Lord of the Hollow Dark (13 page)

“To employ classical images, my friends, we shall know the Dionysian ecstasy. Away with Apollo! Our Lord is not the lord of prohibitions and shackles. We are to be liberated, here beneath this house: liberated from guilt, from shame, from memory, from expectation. We shall be immersed in the true reality, the eternal
present.
Our ceremony of innocence shall purge us of lesser fears and longings. In an experience that fulfills and satisfies every dream and desire, an experience attainable nowhere but here on Ash Wednesday night, you shall know such pleasure as the ordinary senses cannot afford. And again I promise you that this pleasure shall have no end.”

Apollinax’s voice, which had risen high, now sank a trifle. “Some may wonder why we have taken unto ourselves names from the poems of Eliot. It is because Eliot knew of Timeless Moments; some vision had been vouchsafed to him. Yet Eliot’s perception was narrow, purblind: his Timeless Moments would have been cribbed, cabined, confined, spoilt by foolish old prejudices from the childhood of the race, trammeled by obsolete conventions, old saws of the Church, notions which modern science explodes. His would have been Timeless Moments of withdrawal, stagnation, inaction.

“Ours, on the contrary, shall be Timeless Moments of passionate intensity, all feeling, all action. We shall take the Kingdom by storm. There shall be no sublimation of desire: we shall acknowledge desire honestly, embrace it, and so be freed. We shall invert Eliot, as we shall invert much else.

“Madame de Tornquist will not shift the candles in vain. Fraulein von Kulp will not pass through that doorway alone. Mr. Silvero will possess what he covets, at Limognes or elsewhere. Hakagawa will be master of all cultures. Gerontion, saved from Christ the Tiger, will not end in fractured atoms...”

“For that relief, Master, much thanks,” said the Archvicar, distinctly.

Apollinax frowned. “But I speak, foolishly, of realities that cannot be expressed adequately in words, those being feeble tools,” he resumed. “Let me answer one other unvoiced question. Doubtless a number of you think it strange that we have assembled in this forgotten house. I tell you that I have chosen Balgrummo Lodging for the consummation of our bold experiment because here ‘prayer has been valid.’

“Beneath the spot upon which this house now stands, there have been celebrated from early times rites not unlike ours. Those ceremonies were put down, repeatedly, by the enemies of spiritual freedom. More than six decades have elapsed since the last collective attempt at communion with the source of spiritual power in this house. All those earlier endeavors were primitive, groping ventures, by contrast with what we shall do.

“Yet the old Romans saw clearly enough when they spoke of the
genius loci
, the tutelary spirit of a place. There still broods over this particular spot the lingering power of those earlier communions; of conceivable centers for our ceremony, none seemed more propitious than this Balgrummo Lodging. Why one place is quick with spiritual force, and another dead to all evocation, remains a mystery. However that may be, here at Balgrummo Lodging we enjoy the likelihood that we will communicate with an Other.

“I spoke of ‘evocation’ just now: well, to aid us in our conscious quest on Ash Wednesday, we shall evoke one spiritual essence at least which, when enfleshed, sought after that timeless condition which shall be ours. ‘The dead alone give us energy,’ it has been said; and also, by another, ‘The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.’ There shall be raised up among us an essence which circumstance has bound to this spot; and that essence, that revenant, shall be compelled to minister to us.”

Marina scribbled stealthily upon a scrap of paper, “What does he mean?” and pushed it toward the Archvicar.

When it was thrust back to her, Marina found under her sentence, in a bold hand, “Necromancy. It has been achieved here before.” Marina found herself not much the wiser.

“Even as I speak,” Apollinax was saying, “clay-shuttered doors are being opened beneath us. Where inquiring souls worshipped so long, we shall worship afresh. Perfect faith is our first necessity; but believe wholly, my friends, and you shall be given all that has been promised, to the last ounce and drop. As some of you know, I have worked experiments before, but those were small tentative things by the side of what we are to do here. The altar lights shall be rekindled, and the offering made ready. Our Lord willing, you are but the privileged first among those multitudes who may transcend repression and come to dwell changeless in the Timeless Moment. Our little forlorn hope must cross the frontier as a body of scouts for a huge host.”

Much of what Apollinax had said, Marina did not understand, really. And she thought-though it was a guilty thought-Perhaps I’m not expected to understand. Everyone else, she surmised from the faces that had been bent upon the Master, had understood far more than she. Little smug smiles on those mask-faces, now and again, somehow had distressed her: secret smiles, perhaps greedy and malicious smiles. Was there a hidden doctrine for the initiates, implied in Apollinax’s sentences-some teaching beyond the rather obscure general doctrine which Mr. Apollinax had uttered just now? Had this talk of his been mostly for her own neophyte ears? O ye of little faith! She must cast out such suspicions. Yet, never before having fancied herself shrewd, she could not help being rather proud of a second reflection, and that second rumination was this: beyond the second doctrine—if there was such—did there conceivably exist a third body of doctrine, harder, more demanding, known only to Mr. Apollinax and possibly to the Archvicar or Grishkin or a few others? Wheels within wheels, labyrinth within maze... However had this notion crept into her poor silly head?

Mr. Apollinax was concluding: “For the present, it is required that we hold ourselves severely in check, an exercise in lustration, as preparation for the ceremony of innocence on Ash Wednesday night. Concentration of essences must be observed, if the frontier is to be crossed by all. After that-why, ‘Do as you will.’ To those who have passed through the Ceremony of Innocence, all acts thereafter are unpolluted. Now go and think on these things.”

He jangled the little silver bell again. People began to rise and make their way out of the dining room. Several stared at Marina rudely, but no one spoke to her-not even Eugenides, intimidated by a glance from the Archvicar. She found herself proceeding down a corridor in company with Madame Sesostris; the Archvicar had lingered behind, perhaps for instructions from Apollinax.

“What, my dear, do you make of all that?” the old lady was asking.

“I’m afraid I didn’t follow him as intelligently as I should have done, except when he spoke of our Lord,” Marina ventured. “Then he sounded like one or two priests I’ve known, but more impressive than they ever were.”

“By that title, I suspect,” said Madame Sesostris, “Mr. Apollinax signified the Lord of This World.”

“What do you mean?” Wasn’t Christ the lord of this world? The old lady smiled her toothy crocodile smile, her sunburnt face condescending.

“You Romans, my dear, never read Luther—or the Manichees, either. Kingdoms of the earth, you know, and Bright Star of Morning, and all that. At least Apollinax admonished those people to behave themselves for the present. Dare I produce my wicked deck of cards, having been so reproved? Ah, here’s Fresca with your handsome man-child. You could entrust Phlebas, too, with him, in case of need; no one else; good night.”

Sweeney and Coriolan stood deep beneath the Lodging, in the old monks’ drain. The air, if oppressive, still was tolerable. Having been disused for centuries, the sewer was not foul underfoot, nor very wet. A trickle of water, from a narrow opening high up, near the head of the sewer, ran down the stone wall and along the floor of the whole sloping drain.

For the most part, the sewer was cut neatly, with infinite labor, through living rock; but when it passed through some small natural cavity or earthy area, it was faced with blocks of ashlar, so carefully hewn that little mortar had been needed between the joints. At more than one point, a thin seam of coal ran through the mass of rock. Observing this, Coriolan said casually, “Up the brae beyond the den head, the Balgrummo Pits gave the Inchburns their fortune, beginning about 1760.”

This sewer channel was far taller than a man’s head; yet it was narrow, barely wide enough for Sweeney and Coriolan to walk through it. Their shoulders almost brushed the walls.

“It’s better than I had expected, Mr. Sweeney,” Coriolan said. “Do you know, sanitation in medieval times, at least the monks’, was superior to what came later? Why, once Reggie Fairlie, the architect, was asked to look into the sewers of Melville House, in Fife-splendid seventeenth-century house, that; you ought to visit it. It seemed that the drains were hopelessly clogged. Well, Fairlie explored the main sewer, quite as we’re doing, and found that it led to a huge underground brick chamber, bigger than a ballroom. That chamber was utterly Filled with dung, to the roof! It had taken three centuries to stuff it, but capacity was reached at last. Here, it seems, the monks flushed the refuse through this drain into the Fettinch Moss. I take it that they must have been able to divert water from the burn into this channel-perhaps there was a sluice by the pond, and the water entered through that aperture high up-the hole we noticed a few minutes ago, with the trickle still coming out of it.”

This Coriolan was damned loquacious. Friendly though he seemed, Sweeney was uneasy with the man. Bain, or Coriolan, must be a really tough type: having had only a few hours’ rest after his fall in the Den, here Coriolan was beside him, little the worse for wear, making himself useful. Sweeney didn’t know how he’d have managed without this help. In the light of their carbide lamps, Coriolan-Bain’s strong face stood out eerily against the dank stone. For a bum, it was a good enough face.

What with charts and suggestions that the Archvicar had produced, they had found their way into the drain with surprising ease. Gerontion had uncovered old plans of the Lodging in the Muniment Room. The Weem Fathers’
necessarium,
Gerontion had declared, must have been what was now a storeroom at the back of the oldest wing of the Lodging. Supervised by the Archvicar, they two had tapped that dreary room’s floor, and had come to suspect that a hollow space lay beneath one wall. Lifting broad flagstones, they had discovered a narrow gulf below, its walls of quarried ashlar at that point.

Sweeney and Coriolan had fetched a ladder and gone down into the dark, with trepidation. “Into the hollow dark, my dear friends,” the Archvicar had murmured as they descended; of course the old toad was too crippled to accompany them. This being an exploratory trip merely, they had not taken any of Apollinax’s acolyte-boys as assistants. Gerontion had extracted from some outbuilding several miners’ hats with carbide lamps fixed to them, and forethoughtfully he had brought a supply of carbide to the Lodging with him. The two of them wore the helmets, which were about seventy years old, Gerontion said; also they carried electric torches at their belts.

They had groped along the sewer, so solidly constructed that no fallen rubble obstructed their way. Once, though, Coriolan’s foot had kicked something, and he had picked the object up to examine it. It was a sculptured fragment, a stone hand with most of the fingers missing and part of a stone forearm. “Gothic,” Coriolan had said, “from the Templars’ time or the later monks’. Faith was flung into the sewer.”

Sweeney hadn’t given a damn. His foot still hurt, but it had turned out that the devil-boy’s shotgun had broken no bones. For nobody but Apollinax would Sweeney have ventured into this ghastly bilge-hole. What Apollinax had said and implied to him, after the defeat at the pend, had made Sweeney dread the Master more than ever he had feared any man before. Why, it was a positive relief to be down here in this collective anus, out of range of Apollinax’s eyes.

They had followed the main drain what seemed an interminable way, until at last they had come to the point where the sewer sloped down into black water; Sweeney, almost tumbling in, had wet himself to the knees. Ugh! But what was more horrid, this sewer was precisely like the passage through which he had traveled in his nightmare, only forty-eight hours earlier.

It was a very, very long drain. “We’re well beyond the policies, probably at the edge of the Fettinch Moss,” Coriolan had suggested. “Like enough the Moss is broader and deeper now than it was when the Priory stood here: the monks would have drained much of it and cultivated the ground.”

He had poked into the water with an iron rod. “Humm! Right here, the drain is choked with rubble. Who could have fetched it down all this way? And did they choke it deliberately? Even if we had divers’ equipment, we couldn’t push much distance beyond this point without huge trouble.”

They had turned back up the sewer. The place gave Sweeney the shakes-hoo-ha! This drain of his nightmare undermined his sense of reality. But of course the sketch-maps and the hints which Gerontion had left with him, that first night at the Lodging, must have worked on his fancy to produce the vision of the underground channels. Still, if he had heard “knock knock knock” and come upon that dead file of his nightmare, he wouldn’t have been much surprised down here.

It had remained to explore certain short side passages which led off from the main sewer; it was hard to tell whether these had been constructed later than the principal channel. They were unrewarding. Two clearly had been blocked overhead, but their original apertures must have opened merely into garderobes of the Lodging, or the preceding Priory, and not into the Weem-supposing there ever had been a Weem. Sweeney and Coriolan now stood in the third of these passages, which was odder, with no indication that the hole of a jakes had ever been pierced through its roof. Both men were nearly exhausted; they leaned against the clammy wall before closer inspection.

“Hell, hell, hell!” Sweeney was muttering. Would he ever get out of this? If they didn’t find a way into the Weem, there would be Apollinax to pay. If they did find a way, things might get even rougher.