Lord of the Hollow Dark Read online

  “But some time about 1920, I suppose, the last Lord Balgrummo, working his way through the chaos of neglected estate papers in the Muniment Room, happened upon a copy of his ancestor’s instructions to the colliers of 1780—and also found fairly detailed charts of the mine entries at the head of the Den and the brae beyond. He seems to have made careful computations as to whether it might be possible to force an opening from a different entry of the coal workings into the uppermost reach of the labyrinth. If the thing had been done by accident in 1780, might it not be done by design after 1920?

  “At that time, he had not yet found his way into the Weem. But he perceived that if one could enter the caves under the Lodging, it might be possible for a pilgrim to emerge eventually at the long-sealed secret exit from the labyrinth, not far from the fall of the Fettinch Water at the den head.

  “Also, having infinite enforced leisure, Balgrummo made repeated solitary investigations of the upper Den, then visited by no one else. He became almost certain of the spot where a privy stair, seldom trodden even before 1500, should terminate near the waterfall. This secret stair, incidentally, may have been hewn from the rock by the Templars, to provide a sally port from their house and the Weem, as well as having a symbolic importance connected with the Purgatory. Yet Balgrummo did not try to open the way to that stair from the outside.”

  “Why not, in Heaven’s name?” Lady Fergusson inquired.

  “In part, I suppose, because of his secretiveness: he could have been observed at outdoor operations. It’s true that presumably he would not have been prohibited by the police from excavating in his own policies; still, they might have suspected him of contriving an escape route, and he wanted no public meddling with the Weem.

  “But mainly, I think, he did not take the easier course—it would have been far less trouble to work from above, instead of passing all the intricate and dangerous and laborious way through Weem and labyrinth, at first not even explored by him-because he knew that he must work out his own salvation with diligence. He must find the path through the hollow dark of the Weem and out again, as the Third Laird had tried in vain to do; because if he were to redeem himself, he must go the way the medieval pilgrims had gone, however hard it might be. This was his Purgatory, literal and symbolic. He would not cheat himself of possible redemption by taking shortcuts. I hope you know Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Do you recall in Bunyan that little delusory hole in the hill, so close to the Celestial City, which actually was ‘the byway to hell,’ no satisfactory shortcut to Heaven? Well, Balgrummo was bent on making his true pilgrimage from beginning to end of the Weem and the labyrinth: therefore he wouldn’t try to enter from the back door First.

  “I think that when first he came upon that frightening underground river which nearly stopped our own progress a few hours ago, he actually swam it, at frightful risk-because pilgrims were supposed to take their chances. Swimming, he passed under that wall of coal, nearly being drowned; but he found his way to the center of the Weem, by providence or luck, combined with his skill as a swimmer. He was a faithful hardy pilgrim, accepting lustration in Styx: that symbolic and literal passage to the heart of the labyrinth, through the underground river, did not daunt him, he knowing the symbolism of the washing away of sins, and also the symbolism of the passage through death to the life eternal. But was there ever so alarming a form of total immersion, so formidable a baptism, as that wild passage in the underground river of the Weem?

  “Later, when he had to make many trips to the upper labyrinth, he managed to restore that medieval sluice shutter which, happily for us, can divert the flow of the underground burn into a lower level of the labyrinth. Thus he was able to bring in tools for his work in the upper labyrinth, and to avoid the risk of being drowned whenever he entered the heart of the labyrinth. Also, diverting the burn made it possible for him to bring in a helper, Jock Jamieson, who was supposed to be one of Lord Balgrummo’s keepers but actually was more like a retainer; at least I’m fairly sure that Jock helped him in the later stages of his work in the Weem.

  “If sheer resolution may save a man’s soul, Balgrummo deserved reward. Yet he was not permitted to win through to the Celestial City. Imagine him just where we are, still hacking at the coal seam, when he was over ninety years old! He had almost succeeded in breaking through where Sweeney made a hole just now. So near, so near...

  “Will you take me for a Pelagian heretic if I suggest that Balgrummo may be forgiven his sins, at the end of all things? His was the punishment of Sisyphus, king of Corinth. Balgrummo strove with all his powers to complete his pilgrimage of grace. Perhaps old Saint Nectan may beg Balgrummo’s pardon for him. So, after all, this may not be Balgrummo’s Hell, but merely Balgrummo’s Purgatory-his Purgatory while he lived, his Purgatory now he’s dead. ‘Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.’”

  Purgatory! The memory of Coriolan descended overwhelmingly upon Marina. “The General taught me my trade.” He had been sent to save her: he had said so. But she could not look upon him again, not this side of the grave. During one of their resting periods while winding their way through the upper labyrinth, Sweeney had told them of Coriolan’s end.

  “Coriolan said to me that the same condition may be either Hell or Purgatory, depending on how one takes it,” she broke in. “Is being killed more than once-well, is it Hell, or is it Purgatory?”

  “It may be Heaven,” Manfred Arcane said, not smiling. “Coriolan told Sweeney that he wouldn’t have wished it any other way. To be valiant, over and over again, until the Last Judgment-there’s glory for you!

  “Apollinax fancies, no doubt, that I conjured up Ralph Bain to balk him. But I never was Gerontion, and I’m no sorcerer. Some other power called Ralph Bain, our friend Coriolan; and some other domination sent him. Such phenomena may occur when for a moment a Simon Magus forces open the portals of Dis. There may be souls among us, in this bent world, that seem quick enough, measured by our imperfect senses; and yet some such may have passed through the jaws of death once, and have been permitted for unknown purposes to return briefly. I could tell you Kalidu tales... but there’s not time for garrulity just now. Eliot wrote that there exist Guardians, seemingly flesh and blood, yet really more than that. Perhaps, my dear Marina, the being we called Bain, or Coriolan, was such a Guardian, appointed to ‘Watch over her in the labyrinth, Watch over her by the quicksand.’ Apollinax opened Time’s door, if only a crack, and in slipped a Guardian....”

  “Brasidas has squirmed through!” Sweeney shouted.

  The hole in the coal face had been enlarged: a torch beam showed Brasidas grinning back through at them. But behind him, so far as they could tell, lay only more darkness.

  A few more blows from Sweeney’s pick made it possible for all of them to crawl through, lugging their tools after them. Here the space was cramped. They found themselves upon more steps carved from the living rock, though a far narrower passage than the Pilgrims’ Stair beneath the Lodging. They had only a few feet of head room.

  Arcane was examining the steps. “Old though these are,” he remarked, “they’ve been little trodden—why, not worn at all, after six hundred years or more. They’re the stairs to Heaven’s gate, obviously.”

  He turned his torch upon the ceiling. It appeared to be a single slab of hard stone, more than eight feet long and nearly four feet wide. Even Marina’s unpracticed eye told her that it simply would not be possible to hack a way through this barrier, standing just underneath it as they did.

  “We’ll never pass that,” said Grizel Fergusson. “So close...” She sank against the wall, her fortitude exhausted at last.

  “No, not through that monolith,” Arcane agreed. “But see here!” Torch in hand, he showed them that the slab was supported, on all four sides, by blocks of masonry of various sizes. The mortar between the blocks was crumbly; Arcane broke some of it with his fingers. This foundation of masonry, several feet high, ran up from the stair on which they stood.

&nbs
p; “What’s on the other side of those stones?” Melchiora demanded, tugging at her husband’s sleeve.

  “In the lower courses, my Pomegranate, soft earth, mold; in the upper courses, air. Why, we can see through!”

  That wasn’t precisely true, Marina found; but from the slimmest of cracks, the faintest of ghosts of daylight filtered into this stairway. She had to put her face almost against the stones to make out that feeble glimmer of natural light, the first they had seen for perhaps twenty hours.

  “Back down those stairs, so far as we can go, which isn’t far,” Arcane ordered the women. A little lower down, they found, the stair was wholly blocked with rubble. “Let Sweeney and Brasidas use the chisels and crowbars from our pack of tools, we keeping out of their way. The construction’s badly weathered outside, needs pointing; our friends should be able to loosen two or three blocks readily enough, and then we shall creep out. Eureka, eureka!” Masons’ hammers rang on the heads of chisels, up where Sweeney and Brasidas were exhausting their last strength, and chips of stone and mortar flew all the way down the stair, one just missing Grizel Fergusson’s nose.

  Emulating Melchiora, Arcane crossed himself. “Praise the Lord who’s not of this world, and praise poor Balgrummo, from whom our present blessings flow.”

  “And just where shall we come out?” Lady Fergusson asked, her lean old body erect again.

  “Why, were it a different season, we should emerge amidst roses, hardy Grizel. Michael shall smile his beguiling smile in the sunlight within a few minutes, Marina. May I call you Marina always? Deborah’s a pretty name, but there’s only one Marina, and she’s been to Gehenna, and now she ascends to the Throne.”

  “Manfredo! Tell us just where we will be when they heave those stones away!” Melchiora seemed ready to pummel her husband in her impatience.

  “There’s one shoved out!” Sweeney called from above. “It was easier levering it out than dragging it in. We’ll have a second one clear in a minute. Come on, Brasidas, heave!”

  “Satisfy your own curiosity, Pomegranate,” Arcane teased her. There was a cry from Brasidas. “He says he’s out, and there’s no one in sight,” Arcane translated.

  Out they crept-first Lady Fergusson, next Melchiora. Marina passed Michael through the hole to Melchiora. Then she wriggled through herself, tearing her wedding gown even more ruinously.

  Marvelous, how marvelous! It was a cold clear day, early afternoon, with the sun out. They stood in the roofless burial chapel, and before them was the lovely panorama of the wild Den, the foaming burn, the statue of Time with his scythe, Balgrummo Lodging, and the Moss beyond the walls. No one stirred anywhere.

  “Why, why-we came out of the prior’s tomb!” Marina breathed in wonder.

  Manfred Arcane stood beside her, drawing in lungfuls of the chill air. “Yes, my dear, it was clever of the Weem Fathers to conceal the secret stair to Heaven’s gate by that trick. The slab was moved from elsewhere, I suppose; or perhaps the old prior was interred somewhere else to begin with, and his tomb slab used from the first to hide the back door to the Purgatory. No one would lift this by accident; but if anyone did ascend from below, having fought through all the purgatorial terrors, the monks could let the pilgrim out by removing two blocks of the supporting masonry. Few, we must take it, were so resolute as Bunyan’s Christian and his friends.”

  Marina sat upon the tomb slab, soothing Michael, and discovered at one corner the carven rose she had found a few days earlier-though that seemed years ago. “There is a rose, one rose for us!”

  “And there will be hundreds in spring, even in this decayed garden,” Arcane said, his arm around Melchiora. “Immortality: that’s the meaning of the multifoliate rose, and that’s why the monks of Saint Nectan, or perhaps the Templars, filled this graveyard with rosebushes. Father Time, down there on his tiny island, has turned his back upon us. Don’t fear him, my friends: the roses of the garden are too many for him.”

  Marina thought suddenly of something she had read in her copy of Eliot’s poems. “Why, footfalls echo in our memory, footfalls in the Weem; but we did take that passage, and we did open the door into the rose garden, the stone door that nobody had opened for five hundred years or more!”

  “We came out of the tomb into the garden,” Grizel Fergusson joined in, “and I confess that I hadn’t thought we possibly could. I feel rather as if Dante and Vergil had led me to the center of the earth and out again.”

  “Neither Vergil nor Dante,” Arcane objected. “Farinata, perhaps.” He turned his back upon the prospect of the Lodging, and looked instead upward toward the waterfall—or rather, Marina guessed, toward the tall tombstone standing upright in unflinching isolation, scornful—the tombstone of Marina’s garden-vision, the tombstone of the last Lord Balgrummo. Arcane bowed his head, pressed his palms together, and for some moments murmured beneath his breath. Then, aloud, “No, Grizel, we had for our cicerone the Lord of the Hollow Dark.”

  “How about another dram of rum?” Sweeney implored. The Dead File hadn’t seized him; he had been resurrected; he wouldn’t be the old Sweeney, ever again. Still, there was nothing much wrong with simple creature comforts.

  “I pour you the last libation, Apeneck,” said Manfred Arcane, turning round again toward them all. He emptied the green bottle into the cup. “Drink to the light!”

  In the moment of their salvation, they almost had forgotten the enemy. Melchiora looked toward the Lodging now, shading her black eyes from the sun. “Will they be waiting down there to catch us, Manfred?”

  Arcane shook his handsome white head. “Apollinax meant that only one was to emerge from the Weem; and except for us, he’ll have succeeded. The others have their hearts’ desire. There was a Polish poet who understood that:

  “Your soul deserves the place to which it came,

  If having entered Hell, you feel no flame.”

  “As for our lion-masked impostor of Kronos, serving the Lord of This World—why, if my vision at the labyrinth’s heart came from between the gates of horn, when the Lodging is searched we’ll find Apollinax in the chapel, though not at his devotions. While I lay in that trance among those bones and relics, the virtue which ran out of me may have run into another being, and then have been returned to me by the borrower. Balgrummo, at the time of his Trouble, had known far more forbidden learning that ever Apollinax learnt. Well, then—Apollinax no more can harm us than he could Coriolan. I think that the Tiger has taken him.”

  Michael babbled something incomprehensible. “I believe he’s saying his first word!” Marina proclaimed. She had been crying hard, from relief, blessed relief; now Michael’s speech restored her.

  “‘The word within a word, unable to speak a word, swaddled with darkness,”’ Arcane murmured. “Perhaps he uttered an incantation or a benediction. Shall we enter the world?”

  Down through the rose garden graveyard they went, down by the paths that paralleled the Fettinch Water, all six of them silly now in their fatigue, hilarious. “De profundis clamavi ad te...” Marina was chanting, not irreverently. They passed Father Time, grimly magnificent in stone.

  “In my end is my beginning,” said Manfred Arcane, bowing smartly to Temporality.

  They should have fallen on their faces from weakness, Marina-Deborah knew, but exultation sustained them all. They strode instead of staggering.

  Some minutes later, they stood beneath the enormous yew, where Marina first had begun to understand her friends. “This tree was here a thousand years before Saint Nectan,” Manfred Arcane declared, “and will be here a thousand years, perhaps, after the pert loquacity of all of us lies buried in graveyard mold. The time of our lives is ever so short, my friends, isn’t it? But who’d choose to be a yew, standing almost outside of time?”

  Marina, ragged and bedraggled though she was, felt a compulsion to be pertly loquacious. “Mr. Sweeney,” she ventured, looking into his blackened and sweat-streaked face, “may I ask your real name?”

  “By coi
ncidence, if there are any coincidences,” Sweeney grunted, “it happens to be Sweeney. Just call me Apeneck-His Excellency gave me that one.”

  Melchiora had taken her white-haired husband by the hand; but Marina did not know what she was saying to Arcane, for she spoke tenderly in Italian. The quondam-arch-vicar, mannerly as the Pirate Dowdirk of Dundee, replied in English—lest he seem rude to the others, Marina guessed.

  “How long will you and I be together, Pomegranate? Why, for eternity. What matters about time, I think, is not duration, but intensity-that is, how we spend it. If we spend it well, we are promised, then we shall transcend time. What the seven of us here, even tiny Michael, experience just now is a Timeless Moment, won by tenacity. We stumbled on together, so escaping damnation. This moment under the yew we share always. In another fashion, those down in the Weem share forever a quite different Timeless Moment. Ecstasy has more forms than one.”

  Some bird flapped over the cold chimneys of Balgrummo Lodging. “And time flies!” Arcane cried, pointing upward. “Enough of my meditations among the tombs; life is for action, we’re told. Our first action must be to lunch, or rather to cook it.”

  “In that house?” asked Sweeney. The irregular bulk of Balgrummo Lodging frowned upon them.

  “And why not?” Grizel Fergusson demanded. “That house is a microcosm of the world, Mr. Sweeney: bones at the bottom, visions at the top. Like the world, Balgrummo Lodging purges itself from age to age. Bring Michael in out of the wind, Marina, for we don’t want him to catch his death of a mere cold, after having escaped, like Isaac, from the altar.” Phlebas-no, Brasidas-had removed his jacket and was trying to thrust it upon Marina, to break the wind for her. Considerably to his embarrassment, Marina hugged him.