Lord of the Hollow Dark Read online

  Sweeney stared at the neat provision hamper. “Wish we had a bottle of something in that basket,” Sweeney said dismally.

  “Dear Apeneck, you address the Genius of the Bottle,” the Archvicar informed him. “Keep your torch directed toward that hamper.” Deftly moving in the dark, the Archvicar produced a strange tall green bottle, dusty, from the basket; produced a corkscrew, too, and a napkin; and while Sweeney stared incredulous, succeeded in uncorking the bottle. The Archvicar poured a little of the liquor into a metal cup dredged up from the depths of the hamper; and Sweeney drank.

  Wow! He coughed furiously: the stuff burnt all the way down, and it was wonderful. “What’s this?”

  “Jamaica rum, two centuries old. That one dram must suffice you for now, Sweeney; we may need such comfort in the depths of the Weem. But I’ve packed three bottles in our hamper. I found them, and more, in a forgotten bin in the old wine cellars, under a heap of empty green bottles like this one. That may have been the last of Balgrummo’s stock: he was no solitary drinker, not he, even after his Trouble; but he must have required something to help him against the cold, away back in this labyrinth, splashing about in ice-water, he more than ninety years old toward the end.”

  Icy water, back of this little door? But Sweeney wasn’t given time to dwell on that prospect. “I say, Sweeney,” Coriolan was calling, “lend a hand for a moment, will you?”

  He set Sweeney to prying with a chisel at the bronze door’s foot, trying to lift it just the merest fraction of an inch on its invisible hinges; but still the lock did not yield, and Sweeney was released again, the door’s recess being too narrow for more than Coriolan and Phlebas to pry about simultaneously.

  That cup of grog had done wonders for Sweeney’s soul. “If we’re going to storm Hell, Archvicar, that stuff in the green bottle will give us a boost, it will. Wow! How about you other chaps-a dram or two all round, Archvicar?”

  But the Archvicar shook his head. “Reserves, Sweeney, reserves! As for storming Hell-why, despite my malicious hints, we don’t really know that there was anything diabolical about what occurred in the Weem. The Columban hermits or monks who baptized this cave, so to speak, were godly enough; the Templars may have been falsely accused of evil rites; the later monks, while doubtless they did well enough out of the richer pilgrims here, may have been quite guiltless of anything worse than covetousness and credulity.

  “If, before the year 1500, you and I, Sweeney, had been permitted to penetrate beyond that little bronze door, with no light but one of those tallow torches; and had been told by the prior not to wander far into the labyrinth, but to sit near the door for twenty-four hours, meditating upon sin and salvation, praying earnestly for the intercession of good Saint Nectan-yes, fasting, saying our beads in total darkness once our torch had burnt out, sprinking a few drops of water from the Holy Well upon our foreheads now and again-why, Sweeney, we certainly wouldn’t have thought of ourselves as diabolists, would we?”

  “Hell, no!” said Sweeney. The rum was making him genial, and he had come to relish the Archvicar’s company, as well as to dread the man. “Was that the way of it here, Archvicar? How do you know?”

  “I speculate upon what scraps of testimony have survived to us. Shall I tell you my theory concerning the Third Laird, his woman, and his other companions?”

  Sweeney gulped: this inquiry sobered him abruptly, for the Dead File of his dream or vision, knock knock knock, was what kept him deathly afraid to enter the Weem-as enter nevertheless he must, within minutes. “If you’re going to tell me that, Archvicar,” he ventured, “could you let me have just a drop more rum?”

  Considerably to Sweeney’s surprise and pleasure, the Archvicar lifted the green bottle from the hamper and poured a larger dram than before. “But restrain yourself, my dear Apeneck,” he cautioned his new henchman, “for there may be pitfalls, deep ones, within the labyrinth, points of no return: that scrap of information, too, I gleaned from parchment in the Muniment Room. Am I speaking loudly enough for your ears, Coriolan?”

  “Quite, thank you,” Coriolan drawled softly. Now he was manipulating the key very gently and hopefully in its wards.

  “Very well, then,” the Archvicar proceeded, “I advance the hypothesis that the Third Laird was no warlock at all; that he, the Bohemian girl, and her alchemist father were of the Old Profession, Catholics; but that interwoven with their Romanism was a good deal of the revived pagan symbolism of the Renaissance—neo-Platonism and all that, after the fashion of Pico della Mirandola. I suggest that the Third Laird, earlier vague and temporizing in his religious professions, probably had been converted to the Roman persuasion by the girl and her talented father. What they intended down in the Weem was not some black mass, but merely a Tridentine mass-with some curious little Scotticisms and classical touches in it, perhaps, and veneration of Saint Nectan. They lacked but a priest, and may have expected to attract one soon, great though the risk of a forbidden celebration would be for him and them.

  “So far as risk went, for that matter, they might as well have evoked Lucifer and all his minions. For Scotland’s Reformers, popery was as bad as witchcraft, and politically more dangerous. Either charge, necromancy or popery, would have sufficed the Regent Morton for his raid upon Balgrummo Lodging. Perhaps Morton vacillated briefly as to which accusation he should bring against Balgrummo. But while there then survived in Scotland the proscribed remnant of a Catholic party, of course there was no warlocks’ party; so possibly Morton chose the charge which would isolate Balgrummo altogether.”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” Sweeney commented. Here he remembered to whom he was speaking, and from what source his rum came, and so straightened himself and said, “I mean, yes, sir, I can understand that: but if you don’t mind my asking, how does all this stuff affect what we’re going to do when and if Coriolan gets that door open?”

  “An intelligent inquiry, Sweeney. My present reflections do have a practical squint, dreamy though they may seem. I demonstrate. Suppose that the Laird, and the Bohemian father and daughter, were Roman Catholics, and clung to the Old Profession even in a time when it could have meant the ruin of them all, so that they must have been sincere enough.

  “So! Would Catholics, even crypto-Catholics, have entombed themselves in the Weem with no prospect but that of physical death slightly postponed? Would not such an action have been suicide, in effect, and so forbidden by the Church?

  “And the act must have been premeditated. We’ve seen how very effective the Laird’s gunpowder charges were—laid by the alchemist out of Bohemia, I suspect. Must not those mines, those petards, have been laid well before Morton stormed the Lodging, in anticipation of a possible assault? The alchemist himself, we’re told, died violently a few days before Morton came—‘by fire and thunder,’ an unpublished contemporary account says. May he not have been laying more elaborate demolition charges somewhere on the premises, and have been too clever by half? However that may be, surely the Laird and the Bohemian girl must have planned in advance for a flight into the abyss of the Weem, should enemies set upon them in overwhelming force. As Papists, would they have designed their own common suicide-and so their own damnation? True, they may have drunk in Stoic doctrine concerning self-destruction, what with the classical tastes of the sixteenth century among the schooled. Yet there survives at least a legitimate presumption that the Third Laird and his people were reasonably orthodox in their Christian morals, so setting their faces against suicide.”

  “What are you driving at?” Sweeney wanted to know.

  The Archvicar, in the blackness, touched Sweeney on the shoulder with his ebony stick, lightly; Sweeney gasped. “Why, Sweeney, if indeed the Third Laird would not have risked damnation by taking his own life, then may it not be that he thought it just possible to escape from the Weem by some secret way, if his men should blow up the entrance or entrances that we have found destroyed? Merely the possibility of such a back gate would have justified the Laird, at least i
n the eyes of casuists, for his act of obliterating the known approaches to this souterrain. One may not deliberately and carefully plan one’s own destruction, and still be saved; yet one may take very great risks of one’s life, to avoid capture and torment, and not be rated a suicide.

  “It’s clear enough, Sweeney, that the Laird did not actually discover his hypothetical escape tunnel-or, if he did find it, it must have been impassable. For lack of it, the lot of the fugitives perished. Could the dead alchemist, a few days earlier, have been blown to fractured atoms while trying to create or reopen that postulated back gate to the Weem?

  “That tapping which you heard in your dreams, Sweeney—and which I used to hear in my dreams as a child, too, here in the Lodging—does it have some significance? Even in their last imprisoned moments, were the Dead File hoping to break through to the hypothetical secret way out of the Weem? And if so...”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Coriolan called, “but I do think I’ve happened on the secret. Will you put your shoulder to the panel, Sweeney? Yes, hard against it; you’ll not hurt old Kronos’ muzzle. Now if Phlebas will hold his torch—you’ll interpret, Archvicar?—a trifle higher, slanting the beam downward, toward the keyhole.... A thrust with this long pin... Aha!”

  The little door banging inward, Sweeney, throwing up his hands to protect his face, was plunged head first into the darkness. He fell, jolted but undamaged, upon smooth stone.

  “We can thank Alec Balgrummo for so easy an entrance,” Coriolan was saying, stooping in the blackness above Sweeney, giving him a hand up. “You don’t see His Lordship about anywhere, do you, Sweeney?”

  “Don’t torment unhappy Apeneck.” The Archvicar’s voice echoed in this low passageway that they had opened. “If we unnerve him, he’ll be demanding more rum. Ah, here’s Phlebas with the biggest torch: let’s see what awaits us ahead.”

  “First, perhaps, a prayer for those who passed this way once, but did not return through this doorway?” Coriolan suggested.

  “By all means, my friend,” said the Archvicar. “You shame me for my pretended ordination. Back into the vestibule, the lot of us, and down on our knees. Will you lead us, Coriolan?”

  “Uuummmm.” Coriolan seemed reluctant to undertake this, but presently began, “O Lord Almighty, Lord even here under the hill, have mercy upon us. Have mercy, if Thou wilt, upon those sinners in the world who do what they may to work Thy will; have mercy, if Thou wilt, upon all the souls in Purgatory, even in this Saint Nectan’s Purgatory, working out their punishments for their many transgressions, yet rejoicing, O Lord, in their very pains, if the pains bring them nearer Thee. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen.”

  “Amen,” the Archvicar rejoined; he could be heard rising from his knees. “And now, before unholy ghosts set upon us, we must find what’s down that tunnel before us. Sweeney, hand me one of those tallow torches that trouble your modern taste; I’ll try the air.”

  He lit the torch, brandished it above his white head, and then hurled it far down the low passage beyond the bronze door. Fallen to the floor of that tunnel, it continued to blaze brightly enough. “Then we’ll not suffocate at once,” the Archvicar pronounced. “Watch your skulls: you’ll need to stoop.” Turning on his electric torch, the adventurer made his way down a narrow low passage, cut through living rock in part, tapping with his stick upon the floor before him with every step he took. “In the beginning,” his voice came drifting back to Sweeney, “first animals, and then men, must have crawled through this hole, in flight, perhaps. Then, before history, men enlarged it... Ugh! What’s that white hulk?”

  From the low passage—it may have been only twenty feet long, but it had seemed a mile—they had emerged into some large chamber. The Archvicar was playing his torch upon an immense white standing object; Sweeney, seeing it, nearly dropped the pick and the coil of rope he had been carrying.

  But the tall thing did not move: it was stone. All four torches were focused upon it now. It was an inscribed stone cross, perhaps fifteen feet high, in perfect condition, covered all over with elaborate carvings: men and beasts and knots and bosses and scrolls, the little men cloaked and hooded and bulky and bearded. It stood toward the further side of a good-sized cave, the roof of which must be more than twenty-five feet high at its summit. The short passage behind the little door had taken them sharply downward; now they were looking upward again, toward the ancient cross.

  Even Sweeney was awed: “Seems as if the thing grew here.”

  “It did, in its way,” the Archvicar whispered. “It’s carved from the living rock, at least the lower part of it; you can see where it merges into the floor. This must be eighth-century work. The Reformers never found their way to it.”

  Coriolan sent his beam round the sides of the chamber—or rather, its circumference, for this cave was nearly round, with a radius of perhaps forty-five feet. Toward their left, another aperture, higher than the passage they had just left, seemed to open upon a second chamber. What with the torch beams crisscrossing the chamber, lighting now on one projection of rock, now on some carved surface, the masses of darkness and shadow, the recesses and irregular roof of the cave—why, Sweeney, who had never been down any large cave before, thought himself gone mad in “caverns measureless to man.” There came no sound at all, unless, just possibly, the ear detected some distant rushing of water. No one spoke above a whisper.

  “A pulpit?” It was Coriolan’s voice, very low, and he focused his torch upon an object to the right.

  Indeed this other massive object seemed to be a pulpit or lectern, a little stair ascending to it, fairly close to the cave wall, the roof low above it. “Much later, that,” the Archvicar estimated: “Norman work, from the Templars’ time, perhaps; the whole, I think, was carved down here, by torchlight, from the native stone.”

  This reality of the Weem was less dreadful than Sweeney’s anticipation of the place had been. The cave was quite dry, and the air tolerable. The floor seemed perfectly even, as if it had been chiseled and scraped painstakingly over the centuries.

  To their left, the torch beams showed a curious wall area of perhaps a hundred square feet, rather like a faded checkerboard of squares seemingly plastered over. “Mural interments,” the Archvicar advised them, “very early.” They caught elsewhere glimpses of deep carving upon the walls, human figures and long bands of decoration.

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” the Archvicar was sighing, “but we must hurry on.” Beyond the huge carven cross could be seen another doorway, or cave mouth made regular by art. They moved cautiously across the floor to that opening, carrying all their impedimenta—picks, rope, the extra electric torches, an armful of the primitive torches, the provision hamper, a heavy canvas bundle of masons’ tools.

  Beyond this second doorway, their torches showed them another short passage, its floor sloping sharply downward. Sweeney felt inclined to say something like “I’ll stay here and keep a lookout;” but he found that he dared not remain alone, whatever the dangers ahead of them might be.

  They stumbled into a second chamber, larger than the first, it seemed. They were deeper still beneath the Lodging or its policies; the ceiling here was very high.

  Hoo-ha! Sweeney had turned his ankle on something, and he was falling in blackness. He splashed heavily into cold water, and it penetrated his mouth and his nose, and he was bubbling and choking and trying to scream for help, and he knew where he was, and it was the cave and the pool of his nocturnal vision, and he was drowning as he had drowned in dream then. Hoo-ha, hoo-ha, hoo-ha! This is what it is to die!

  Yet he was dragged out of that pool, with demoniac laughter sounding in his ears. Hands turned him over; the water flowed out of his mouth and nose. “After all, Sweeney, my lad,” the Archvicar’s voice was saying, “that baptismal pool’s less than sixteen inches deep.”

  Sitting all soaked and bewildered, Sweeney could see by the torch beams that indeed this was the horrid pool of his vi
sion. His hand encountered something hard—the stalagmite against which he had stumbled, both in his dream and just now.

  “Show me the wall,” Sweeney begged, his voice shaking. Someone turned his beam upon the mass of limestone. Back of the pool was a large recess, ear-shaped, in the wall-the recess into which Sweeney had crept, in his vision, as the Dead File had approached.

  Sweeney began to hack and sob, cold and wet and fearful that the knocking might commence. Had it been reality a few nights ago, and was it dream now, or the other way round? The thought passed through his brain that all his life, heretofore, he had subsisted by silly shallow mechanistic notions; and now he was ending trapped in a deeper, darker reality.

  “Don’t despair, Sweeney: drink the cup that cheers,” someone was saying. With both trembling hands he took the metal cup; it was full of rum, and that drink was the fiercest thing that ever had gone down his gullet, but it took the chill out of him almost at once. He was helped to his feet. With these three steel-nerved friends beside him, perhaps that knocking would not come upon him here, just now.

  “A noble thing, over there,” Coriolan was murmuring. Three beams illuminated what Coriolan had detected. This was a rock tomb, or rather a sarcophagus. On three sides the tomb was cut into the rock; but the fourth side, toward them, was an immense slab carved by some early master, perhaps Romano-British, in a style half classical, half barbaric, the symbols of the dying age and the dawning age intermingled. The massive tomb lid, similarly carved, leaned unbroken against the rock wall.

  They crossed the cave to the sarcophagus, the Archvicar leading them, tapping with his stick at every step he took. Sweeney tagged behind the other three-yet not far behind.

  This tomb, they found, was wholly empty. “This must have been Nectan’s coffin,” the Archvicar declared, almost to himself, in a tone of intense excitement, “though perhaps borrowed from an earlier owner. Oh, worshippers have been down here long before the Culdees came! There should be Mithraic emblems; but I suppose the first monks tossed those out, or obliterated them, and perhaps extirpated the Mithraists, too.”