Lord of the Hollow Dark Page 32

  Perhaps she was dead by this time. The exulting frantic babble of disciples and acolytes blotted out her moaning, if she still moaned. Next they would come for Apeneck Sweeney—though it must be far past midnight, appointed for the Timeless Moment, the moment of the damnation of all. No matter: Apollinax must get rid of Sweeney, and for that the first day of Lent would be as good as Ash Wednesday.

  Even if it should have come to pass that Sweeney had gone free from this, he never would have forced himself upon a woman again—not after having been present at the destruction of Grishkin. Apollinax’s sickle, and Apollinax’s crew, would make that abstinence certain; but even had he escaped, what had been done there to Grishkin had burnt the lustful brute out of him. In years past, he had been in his little nasty way what these damned ones had been this night in their diabolical final way. He would make no more war upon women. He had been purged of his coward’s vice-too late.

  He was dimly aware that consciousness was slipping from him, after he had been compelled to suffer bound through the whole torment of Grishkin. He was in that cave pool again, sinking, sinking, sinking; and he was glad to drown.

  “Sweeney,” someone was whispering to him, “sit up, man.” He tried to lie drowned at the bottom of the pool, but that was not permitted. Someone propped him against the wall. He felt cold steel pass along his wrists, and he opened his eyes: it would be Apollinax with the sickle.

  It was not Apollinax. It was Coriolan, his friend Bain, and Coriolan with his little black knife was cutting the ropes that bound Sweeney’s wrists and ankles.

  “Can you stand up?” Coriolan demanded urgently, chafing Sweeney’s ankles. “Try, old chap, try!”

  Sweeney did try, and collapsed.

  “Here, take this!” Coriolan thrust an electric torch into the bosom of Sweeney’s shirt. “They’re at the center of the Weem; go down to where we found that water...”

  But now the damned had seen Coriolan, and a howl rose, and all of them were turning away from the mutilated thing on the timber cross and rushing toward Coriolan and Sweeney.

  Apollinax, the sickle in his hand, came quite close up to them, though seeming to hesitate, and the blood-spattered crowd of disciples and acolytes thronged round their Master. Fly-Mask with the shotgun stood beside Apollinax.

  “What are you?” Apollinax asked Coriolan. Perhaps Apollinax really did not know the answer, any more than Sweeney did.

  The tall man in the kilt stood between Sweeney and that mob of the damned. “A sinner,” he said, “but you can’t do anything to me.”

  Still Apollinax hesitated, perhaps because Coriolan had the little knife ready in his fist, perhaps because he did not know with certitude the nature of his adversary. “You’re a dead thing,” the Master told Coriolan, “and you heard my summons.”

  “I was sent, not summoned,” Coriolan answered, “and sent to block you.”

  “You’re a pawn, and we can kill you.” The Master gripped the sickle.

  In the face of all these beast-people, Coriolan’s hearty laugh rang out, and even Apollinax drew back a little. “Why, I’ve died more than once already, I think, whatever death is, and that’s my punishment, and that’s my reward. Now clear out, for you’re not to have this man.”

  He turned his head slightly, whispering to Sweeney, “Run for it, old man, run for it hard while I tussle, and don’t look back. I’ll be right enough-been through this sort of thing before, and worse. I wouldn’t have it any other way. One man’s pain, another man’s pleasure, you know. Tell Marina I learnt my trade in the General’s school. Be off now, Sweeney, up the pilgrims’ path, in more ways than one. On the double!”

  But Sweeney’s legs would not obey him, and he lingered, propped against the wall.

  The mob of the damned ones, imprisoned here forever in their Timeless Moment of horror, still wavered about them, eager to destroy, fearing to touch the unknown. “You’re dead,” Apollinax had started to say, “and have no power...”

  But Coriolan shouted, a shout loud enough to have waked the fleshly ruin on the timber cross, and dashed at Apollinax, tumbling him over. “Good at need!” he was roaring. Then twenty-four pairs of hands were clutching at Coriolan, and he was striking heavy blows with knife and fist and foot, falling, rising again, shouting, trampling on some, tossing one in the air, Samson at Gaza.

  And still Sweeney could not stir.

  “Take him, take him,” Apollinax was sobbing, “and put him on the altar!”

  Coriolan had drawn the whole mob away from Sweeney, and had cleared a ring round himself. “Run for it, now or never, friend!” he bellowed.

  From the ring of the damned about Ralph Bain, Coriolan, a shotgun muzzle thrust out, and there came a thundering blast.

  Coriolan fell, for the charge had struck him in the middle. Yet they did not seize upon him. They scattered, wailing.

  And Sweeney could see where Coriolan had fallen in his blood. But the shape there was shimmering, translucent, smokelike. Then it vanished altogether. No corpse lay upon the floor.

  At that terror, Sweeney ran as if a spirit himself. Wailing like the others, he rushed into the second chamber of the cave, and through that chamber, and into the beginning of the labyrinth. He blundered on in blackness, bruising himself, slipping, falling to his knees, scrambling up, groping, sobbing like a child, hoping to lose himself in the heart of the Purgatory.

  Minutes might have passed, hours might have passed; days might have passed; Sweeney could not tell, in this place of Time the Devourer. He found himself at the lip of that pit or gulf, with the plank still across it.

  How had he contrived to get here? He had gone this far within the labyrinth twice before, and the Archvicar had drilled the clues into his head: “Pass the first gap on the left; pass the first gap on the right; take the round-headed doorway second on the right...” No, Sweeney couldn’t tell how he had blundered here, but at some time during his flight he must have remembered the little torch, for now he held it, switched on, in his hand.

  Yes, this was the gulf they had crossed, surely. Yet was it? For Sweeney heard the sound of rushing water, almost at his feet. That pit or channel had been dry, he recalled, when they had reached that spot before.

  However that might be, nothing was possible for him but to cross the pit by the plank. Having done so, he lay down on his belly and peered into the crevasse, holding his torch into the mystery below. He could just make out the glimmer of flowing water. It had not been there earlier. Was he mad, or in a coma, dreaming while they tormented his body on the butcher-table altar?

  He stumbled on, and came presently to the second barrier, the body of silently flowing water-or to the place where it should have been. His torch showed that this must be the place of their farthest penetration earlier; there was that seam of coal, barring the way.

  But now the underground river had vanished, and in its place was a channel about eight feet deep, with only a trickle, comparatively, at its bottom. This must be a dream maze!

  He sat here on the lip of the drained channel, his brain empty, he unable to go forward, to go backward. Then he began to hear the knocking.

  Knock knock knock. Knock knock knock. Hoo-ha, hoo-ha, hoo-ha! Nothing mattered now. The footfalls came very close, passing within two or three feet of him, it seemed, and the knocking on the stone walls was terribly loud.

  Nothing mattered now. He turned his torch beam upon the passage through which he had come. There was nothing at all to be seen, though the knocking continued; then it began to diminish, to recede, and went away up the passage. He had been ignored. He was nothing to the dead. And these dead, so long dust, were nothing to him, now that the terror of Coriolan’s vanishing obsessed him.

  He may have sat there a vast while, or for only seconds: it did not matter. Then—

  “Swee-ney!” a low voice said. He was startled out of his apathy: this was worse, far worse, than the knocking, this direct address. “Swee-ney!” it came again, from below him, as if a demo
n were calling. He had been dangling his legs over the edge of the channel of the vanished burn. Something clutched his right ankle.

  “Ahhhhhhhh!” At that touch, a cry burst out of Sweeney, beyond his control, and he snatched away his ankle, and dropped his little torch into the darkness below. But a light came up out of the channel, and hands fastened on his shoulders.

  “Get away, get away!” Sweeney squealed, restored to vigor by this new fear, fending off the thing with his hands as if it had been some huge spider. He leaped to his feet, but a beam shone in his face.

  “Swee-ney!” someone repeated, insistently. The beam was turned back upon the torch’s holder, to show the face of the speaker.

  It was Phlebas. “Swee-ney!” The little man was pointing to handholds in the stone, below, pointing and beckoning.

  They must have stationed Phlebas as a sentinel here, or else sent him this far in search of Coriolan and Sweeney. He followed Phlebas down into the channel, where the water ran only so high as their ankles, and down under a thick stratum of coal. Some awareness was coming back into Sweeney’s head; even some faint hope. They turned to their left, ascending a few steps; and Sweeney saw the light of torches in a big rock chamber. They must be at the center of the Weem.

  Melchiora and Lady Fergusson were bent over Manfred Arcane, who had been lying unconscious for two hours. He seemed to stir slightly, unless Marina had mistaken a shifting of the torch beam for a motion of the man’s hand. There came noises from behind Marina, and she swung round in the dread that it might be Apollinax. But the torch showed her Brasidas, with Sweeney.

  “Coriolan, Captain Bain, where is he?” she asked, all shaking.

  Sweeney’s lips moved, but nothing came out for a time. She cried, “Do they have him?”

  Sweeney put his hands to his forehead. “No, no, they couldn’t hold him. But he won’t be coming here. He told me to tell you that he learnt his trade in the General’s school.” Something like a sobbing groan came out of Sweeney.

  She was about to seize him and shake everything out of him, when they heard Arcane utter something. They knelt about the man on the floor.

  Arcane mumbled mostly, but one sentence came from him distinctly: “You are foul!”

  Then his right hand began to make chopping movements. “Manfredo, Manfredo!” Melchiora held him, cooing at him in Italian.

  Manfred Arcane, once the Archvicar, opened his eyes; sat up; shook his head several times, as if to clear it; blinked in the torchlight that was focused upon him; stretched his arms.

  “Strange,” Arcane muttered, “wonderfully strange. The virtue drained out of me-the vitality, the energy, whatever animates the soul and the body-so swiftly. Was I gone from you long? And where did I go? Nothing quite like that ever came over me before, do you know. Strain, perhaps? The heavy air here? Do I dodder?”

  Melchiora was embracing him, whispering in his ear. But he put her aside gently, and rose to his feet.

  “Such a dream,” Marina heard him say, “horrid, quite horrid, quite real and vigorous: but not unnatural in this place, I suppose. I dreamed that I was drained of blood, but rose again; and then I destroyed Apollinax with a labrys. Ugh! Give me a torch, if you will.”

  He flashed it round. “Sweeney! You’ve come through: I felt sure you were man enough for that. Where’s Coriolan?”

  “They don’t have him,” Sweeney mumbled. “He’s gone away; they couldn’t hold him.”

  “Gone into the Lodging?”

  “Gone into nothing. He won’t be here. I can’t think of a way to tell you...”

  “Don’t try just now, Sweeney. I guess; I suspected it from the moment he came. Tell us later, for this isn’t the place or the time for it. Ah, Marina, don’t cry; it couldn’t have been otherwise; he’s not to be pitied, not by you and me. Something like this had happened to him in Ireland, I think, some time before he came here-if one can speak of ‘time’ in such a connection; and before that, years before, defending a woman.... I knew his family a little. Would you have guessed that he was born only two or three years after I was? Not from his appearance, would you? That first roused my suspicions: he hadn’t aged. Why pity him? There’s nothing pitiable in dying a hero’s death over and over. The ancients would have said that he was favored of the gods above all men. No demon sent him to us.”

  Arcane turned from her. She heard the clink of glass: Arcane must be fumbling in that hamper. How trivia force their way into your mind, when you’re overwhelmed by deep mysteries!

  “The cup that cheers, Sweeney,” Arcane was saying. “Not too much, now: we’ve a climb of that wall ahead of us, and then puzzling exploration, and hard labor at the end.

  “We must creep through the upper labyrinth-difficult enough, even with Balgrummo’s indispensable calculations-and then we’ll get into early forgotten entries, the passages made by the first colliers here. Balgrummo found himself unable to clear the blocked portion of the upper labyrinth, the part that had been sealed, like the Pilgrims’ Stair, in the year 1500. So, using the old diagrams of the sixteenth-century miners, Balgrummo constructed a detour around the collapsed portion of the labyrinth. He broke into the ancient ‘entries’ or workings of the old mines just up the brae beyond the Den-mines to which the entrances were sealed long ago-and made his way through those entries, and then constructed another tunnel leading back toward what was left of the upper portion of the labyrinth, near the secret exit from the maze. He never completed his second passage toward the back door of the labyrinth, but we may complete it for him.

  “You don’t follow me, figuratively speaking? Then you must follow me literally through the tortuous route made by Balgrummo-supposing that the path itself hasn’t collapsed during the past six years.

  “The Third Laird may have hoped, four hundred years ago, to save himself and his people by doing what Balgrummo was almost to accomplish long later: that is, to break through to the back door of the labyrinth. But the Third Laird had only hours for the work, and the last Balgrummo had decades to swing a pick in the darkness.

  “What an enormous task for one man—or for two, in later years, if old Jock the keeper helped him, as I suspect he did! Balgrummo had to prop the ruinous sixteenth-century entries—access to them had been stopped up in the Fourth Laird’s time-as best he could, working in foul air. And then, do you know, Balgrummo must have cut his way through coal, one or two picks only to do the work, back into the uppermost portion of the maze! His detour in the hollow dark succeeded, though not the whole of his design.”

  There was a rattling of tools; Arcane must be groping about the bundle that Phlebas had been carrying. He went on: “Balgrummo came close, nevertheless-we’ll know just how close when we’re at the spot-to his intended victory. Given one day more, he thought, he might have emerged from the Purgatory into open air. He was not granted that one day: he caught pneumonia, and lay three years bedridden, being so old, and then died. Jock the keeper might have finished the work for him? Possibly; but that would have been pointless, for it must be Balgrummo’s personal triumph, physical and spiritual, or it could be no victory at all.”

  The old audacious adventurer seemed to be fitting something to Sweeney’s head-yes, the old lady’s torch gave them a glimpse of one of those helmets with a carbide lamp. “Balgrummo wore one of these,” Arcane was saying, “and you’ll swing a pick where he swung one, Sweeney.

  “Balgrummo had discovered the secret exit, closed since 1500, from Saint Nectan’s Weem-the way out known only to a secret few, perhaps the Templars first of all, long before 1500. I know where it is, from Balgrummo’s jottings. Now it’s a question of whether we’re strong enough to finish his work, the lot of us. We’ll find water to drink along the way: there’s always water in old mines. But finish what food is in the hamper, friends, and we’ll go up those handholds and footholds in that wall before us. The worst is behind us, I think, but one can’t be certain.

  “Yes, I dreamed that I destroyed Apollinax. What, Melchiora, don�
�t you think I’m fit for the climb? Why, I have to be, unless Apollinax is to destroy us. Would you leave me here for his tender attentions? Up we go!”

  They had to get her baby up that wall, passing him hand to hand or perhaps pulling Michael up in the hamper! That thought drove much else out of Marina’s head, for the time being. A torch illuminated the wall face; Brasidas clambered up the footholds, the coil of rope slung over his shoulder; got through the gap at the top; flung down the end of the rope.

  They would push tortuously on, hoping, praying, the hardy pilgrims’ way. Some saint had said-was it Bernard of Clairvaux?—that the difference between the damned and the saved is this: everyone except the damned gets up and stumbles on.

  19

  Ozymandias at Last

  Apollinax sat on a chair in the chapel, surveying the enormous “Fuseli” cartoon in a pleasant delectating way, and reflecting on the night’s events. It was three o’clock in the morning, as humankind measures time. He was Master here, solitary master, and nothing that he had imprisoned down there below would rise from the Weem again. Thirty-two lives had been snuffed out, or were in process of expiring; thirty-two essences had been condemned to grope and shriek in the Weem’s darkness forever and a day.

  It was regrettable that not the whole of the experiment had been fulfilled. The Mother and the Child had escaped the physical torment, although they would die of hunger and despair in the labyrinth. The Ceremony of Innocence had not been wholly consummated; yet the immolating of Grishkin the Raven, and the joy of the disciples and the acolytes in that torment, sufficed to ensure the imprisonment of his dupes’ essences in one moment of eternity, one endless agonized moment of total depravity. Certain delights had been omitted, necessarily-among them the general sexual congress on which he had counted, the culmination of the ecstasy of the animals.