Lord of the Hollow Dark (18 page)

Sweeny felt imprisoned: no exit, no doors. He glanced behind him, as if to secure his retreat: not even a door where he had entered! For on their inner sides, the several doors to this room were concealed by cunningly-designed simulated bookshelves, to which were fixed the backs of antique books, glued there to look like the real thing. Only inconspicuous bronze doorpulls betrayed the situation of the disguised doors. It was as if once within this library, the unwary intruder were trapped until the end of time, condemned to wear out his eyes with promiscuous pathless study, decade upon decade, generation upon generation, while the sensual world passed him by.

Sweeney had thought himself alone in this tomb-library. But from a high-backed chair near the chimneypiece, a voice sounded softly, making Sweeney jump: “Come over here, Apeneck, and be enlightened. I shall speak for your instruction.”

It was the Archvicar, hidden by the chair back. Sweeney seated himself uneasily upon a Queen Anne stool beside the hearth. Huddled there in the huge chair, Gerontion looked more decrepit than ever. “Apollinax has been delayed,” the Archvicar informed him. “I believe that he’s endeavoring to soothe the shattered nerves of that von Kulp trollop, still all aquiver from the encounter with her spectral visitant. Keep your voice low, for all that. I want your news. How far have you penetrated, down below?”

Sweeney felt all scratches and bruises and grime, and he had been granted no more than three hours’ sleep out of the past twenty-four. He heard himself speaking, in a blurred way, as if it were someone else’s voice.

“Coriolan’s still at it down there. How he keeps it up, I don’t know. The sketch plan you gave us is pretty close to right. We got out those stones blocking up that sort of doorway at the back of the side drain. Then we shored up the lintel with timbers we found in the old carpenter’s shop-risky, that, because once or twice we thought everything overhead was coming down-and what do you know, back of that doorway was a kind of crawl space, up high! There’d been a rough passage or tunnel beyond that doorway-hasty sixteenth-century mining, Coriolan thinks-but it had been blown up a long time ago, and it was choked with rubble almost to the top, except for that tight crawl space under the roof of it. Even the crawl space couldn’t be got through until Coriolan had pulled more fallen stone from it. I left the clearing-out to him: the whole tunnel is splintered and cracked from the old explosion, and might collapse any second and crush you to pulp like a worm. But Coriolan was crazy enough to try it. We got a barrow down into the sewer, and carted the rubble from the tunnel down the main drain and dumped into the water where the sewer ends. And when we did that, we found a pile of older rubble just under the surface of that bog water, as if somebody had been operating the way we are, but long ago.”

The Archvicar nodded. “That will have been the last Lord Balgrummo, and perhaps the Fourth Laird long before.”

“That’s what Coriolan says. How in hell does he know? Well, once he had pretty well cleared the crawl space, Coriolan snaked on through. He must have crawled twenty or thirty feet up that black hole-yeah, it slants up, not down. With the luck of fools, he made it. You’ve got to give it to that Bain, or Coriolan, the tramp: he’s tough, really tough. Well, he made it, though nobody else will go through till we finish clearing the tunnel and prop it as much as we can with the timbers I’ve been sawing. We had to drag Coriolan back out by his feet, but he’d crawled to the far end, and he’d got his head and an arm out the hole at the other end of the passage, and with his electric torch he’d taken a look at the room beyond.”

The Archvicar leaned foward toward Sweeney, all eagerness. “You mean that he had a glimpse into the Weem, the Purgatory?”

“Not exactly. Coriolan says that he was looking into a kind of ruined antechamber, the floor of it thick with fallen stones. On his left hand, he made out the foot of a stone staircase, more than ten feet broad, carved out of the living rock. Just the foot, the bottom two or three steps, of the stair: everything above that seems to be fallen rubble, blown to smithereens, the roof caved in. Coriolan says that this must be the foot of the medieval pilgrims’ grand stair into the Purgatory, and that nobody’s gone down it since the fifteenth century, maybe.”

“What else?” The Archvicar gripped his stick.

“Well, on his right hand, Coriolan could see mostly solid rock, but some masonry about the middle of it, ancient work. And recessed into the masonry was a little low doorway with a closed door. Coriolan thinks the door is brass or bronze—anyway, worked metal, with ornamental reliefs on it. That’s all he could make out. This vestibule, or anteroom, or whatever it may be, is a narrow dangerous wreck of a place, understand: it’s only an accident, Coriolan thinks, that it wasn’t totally blown apart and blotted out and filled up when the Pope ordered the Weem destroyed, and later when the Third Laird sealed himself inside the Weem. If the Laird’s men had had more time to lay their gunpowder, Coriolan says, the north tower of the Lodging might have collapsed and settled right down into the remaining scrap of the vestibule, probably. As it is, when we clear that little tunnel leading up from the sewer, we may be able to get at that metal door. But Coriolan tells me that anyway the Warlock Laird may have laid more powder on the other side of that little door and have blocked the Weem forever, or even collapsed the whole cave on the other side of the door.”

“I think not,” said the Archvicar.

To Sweeney, this was an unwelcome opinion. He did not at all desire to pass through that little door: definitely not. There might be horror within, something told him-dead horror, living horror. That Weem wasn’t his dish. “What in hell makes you think there’s anything left behind that door?” The Archvicar had lighted another of those stinking cheroots. “Various evidences, my dear Apeneck. For one thing, in Balgrummo’s study I have come upon an interesting notebook, in a code of sorts, cryptic even when decoded. But from it I gather that the last Lord Balgrummo, in his halfcentury of enforced leisure here, performed Herculean labors. It appears from the notebook, if I understand the jottings aright, that he contrived to open that sealed doorway-then well mortared-in the side channel of the sewers. He was incredibly strong, even in advanced years, they say. I fancy that Balgrummo himself, at great physical peril, excavated the crawl passage through the rubble of the tunnel which his ancestor the Third Laird had constructed as a new access to the vestible of the Weem.”

“Yeah, that’s Coriolan’s theory, too. But would the police have let Balgrummo dig like a mole?”

“How could they have guessed? He was alone in the Lodging, all night, every night, the servants having gone home at nightfall, canny folk they; and the keepers were distant down in the gate lodge at the pend. For that matter, I suspect that he may have had help from one of the keepers, a former police constable called Jock, who used to behave more like a retainer of Lord Balgrummo than a warden at a private asylum. And, after all, it was his own house he was exploring: so long as he didn’t leave the policies of the Lodging, the police were satisfied, I suppose.”

“So you think he got as far as Coriolan has gone?”

“And farther. I am inclined to conclude, Sweeney, from the latter portion of the coded notes, that Balgrummo entered in at the strait gate-at that little metal door, I mean; that by a perverse passion he was drawn to whatever lies within; and that he made such a horrid chthonian pilgrimage more than once.” Gerontion blew smoke rings. “Perhaps the adventure gave him motive for continuing to live-if only a life in death.”

Sweeney gaped. “I can’t believe it. But you said you’ve got more evidence?”

“I think,” Gerontion murmured, “of the two burglars who came down the walls of the Den on ropes, and were not seen again. The police made thorough search of the Lodging at that time, I understand, finding no trace whatsoever of the missing men. Where might they have gone? Why, below-but as cadavers. They might have been dragged down, those two hoody crows, to the water at the foot of the main drain; but the Weem would have been a more secure hidie-hole for such remains. Were they offerings of a sort, that brace of wretches, do you suppose, Sweeney?” The Archvicar blew two more smoke rings, carefully, as if in memoriam.

Sweeney held up a hand in silent warning.

In the south wall of the library, one of those pseudo-bookcases with the false backs of books was swinging inward. Grishkin entered, so elegant, so expressionless. “The Master will be with you in another half-hour,” she said, almost as if announcing a plane arrival. “Mr. Sweeney may return to his work within the hour.”

“Thanks a lot, baby,” said Sweeney. She went out the way she had come. She must be on
kalanzi
all the time, Sweeney thought: enough to make her a zombie, not enough to keep her from functioning in more ways than one. Apollinax must like them that way, strictly from Deadsville.

There wasn’t much time to ask about Apollinax, and the Archvicar might betray him, but Sweeney was desperate. He had to get some idea of what was going to happen in this house, Wednesday night if not sooner. “Gerontion,” he muttered urgently, moving closer to the Archvicar, “what’s Apollinax up to? Is he crazy enough to take everybody down below, and then...?”

“As for what he means to do down below,” the Archvicar told him, “I can’t inform you. After all, it may be merely some silly, harmless mock liturgy, Gnostic in character. As for what he is, I am not at all certain. As for what he thinks he is, I can hazard a surmise.”

Sweeney felt frozen with loneliness: this malign old cripple could be of no help to him when the hour came, even if, as he professed, he wasn’t leagued with Apollinax-itself a dubious premise.

“The first thing to accept,” Archvicar Gerontion was saying, very low, “is that Apollinax believes wholeheartedly in himself, and has some reason to believe. He is not playing. He has tested his talents before now; our present experiment, however, is on a grander scale.

“Try to imagine this, Sweeney. Put on the mind of the man called Apollinax. Fancy that you, as Apollinax, have come to believe that you are something other than human.”

“
Other than human
?”

“Quite, my friend. Think of yourself as a Domination or a Power, perhaps an incorporeal being, which for a great while has been imprisoned in darkness and pain-for ages, suppose-a burning consciousness long unable to scratch or do mischief directly, working only through groping agents, frustrated and infuriated by this intolerable limitation. Think of yourself as blinded and bound in the dark, when you are all burning malignant energy. You follow me?”

“Part way,” said Sweeney. He felt cold all through.

“Well, then, my Apeneck, next try to imagine that somehow this infuriated Power has contrived to take on sub-stance-within your own flesh, you being Apollinax. True, the substantial form itself is subject to those infirmities fixed to all flesh: a knife or a bullet might end the conjunction of body and spirit. This temporarily incarnate Power must act through the puny despicable five senses of man, for the most part. The very physical brain that governs its envelope of flesh is fallible, an exasperating imperfect tool for this Power’s aspirations. Despite all that, this Power is occupying a human body; for want of a clearer concept, let us say that it is possessing some mortal’s body. To this body, the name Apollinax has been tagged. Whatever its limitations in the form of Apollinax, this Power rejoices in its partial liberation from impotence.”

“The hell you say!”

“How well you put the essence of all this, Apeneck! This Power, this Being, is bent upon grand destruction of life and of more than life. In that devastation, our present little ominous gathering at Balgrummo Lodging is only one step toward more splendid satisfactions. All of those present in this house are subjects in a rather petty experiment by this Power. The object of this present ‘retreat’ or ‘seminar’ is to determine just how adept this Power already has become in operating within the bounds imposed by incarnation. If the experiment at Balgrummo Lodging comes off to the Power’s satisfaction—why, a more significant stride will be taken so soon as practicable.”

The great globe itself seemed to spin round and round in Sweeney’s tired aching head. Had he appealed from one lunatic to another lunatic? Was he really in this bemusing house with its many levels, and was this man before his eyes really the sanctimonious drug peddler of Haggat, and was Apollinax a fell spirit incarnate? Hoo-ha! Oh, you’ve got the hoo-ha’s coming to you, Sweeney boy!

Yet the gradual change he had seen in Apollinax over the past two years, the Master grown stranger and grander at every successive encounter; his total domination of those disciples, some of whom once had possessed minds and wills of their own; the Master’s absolute enslaving of those acolytes, as if he were the Old Man of the Mountain, beyond what even the madder well-known crazy cults could exact in obedience... Sweeney shook himself. “Where’d you get these way-out ideas, Gerontion?”

The Archvicar stood up, as if to ease his back. “I offer you no judgment, Apeneck. Can’t you understand that I am trying to tell you what, I suspect, Apollinax
believes
himself to be? ‘Put on his mind,’ I told you a moment ago. I have been describing the mentality, the personality, the soul with which we have to deal. Our Master has favored me with several privy conversations, these past three days. As for the reality...”

A few days earlier, Sweeney would have told anybody that Apollinax was not much more than a garden-variety charlatan, talking a pseudo-occult jargon, wheedling large new checks out of little old women. But the Apollinax who had enchained him here at Balgrummo Lodging had grown overwhelming, fearsome, hideously convincing, almost incandescent with power of some sort. The reality...

“Yeah,” said Sweeney. “What about that? Let me tell you, he’s weird. How much can he actually do that he hints he can do? How do we know that he’s not hearing what we say right here and now, some way or other?”

Gerontion replied slowly. “I suspect that he can do some astonishing things; certainly he thinks he can. Do you know, I have a kind of awareness of Apollinax’s self-awareness? Is my insight into him transmitted from Apollinax’s mind to my mind, deep crying unto deep, evil unto evil? If so, is the transmitting of this awareness accidental or deliberate, on Apollinax’s part? I can’t say. Or is this awareness of mine some operation of the illative sense—everything suddenly falling into place, all my suspicions and surmises about Apollinax fitting together like parts of a puzzle, some obscure catalyst of the brain ingeniously combining fragmentary perceptions into a whole? I don’t know. Yet somehow I sense what Apollinax fancies himself to be: I apprehend his ‘self-image,’ as the psychologists smugly put it.”