Lord of the Hollow Dark (23 page)

Marina was not particularly happy to learn that the Purgatory might be accessible: the Master’s enthusiasm for crawling far down below had not infected her. She always had thought of looking upward for eternity. Only human beings could look up, she had read somewhere; other creatures weren’t constructed that way. Could this kindly man give her a hint of what might be found below-perhaps something more cheerful than the hints thrown out by the Archvicar? “Why should Purgatory be under the earth, Captain Bain?”

He rose to put another blanket over Michael: certainly it was clammy in this storeroom, or whatever this place was, and how could the Master expect Coriolan and Sweeney to sleep down here? Why wasn’t this man sleeping right now? But she was thankful that he hadn’t been.

“If you’ve no objection,” he said, after a slight pause, “we might do well to use our pretend-names, Marina. His High Mightiness above stairs prefers that, and who are we to say him nay? I should like to address you as Miss Thingumabody, but ‘Marina’ must do, overly familiar although it sounds; and so let me be called Coriolan, even though I’d nearly forgotten about that writing johnny Eliot. Besides, a pseudonym, like a mask, can have a certain liberating effect, I suppose. What were you asking? Ah, yes, about Purgatory.

“No, Purgatory’s not always under the earth, Marina, or even usually down there, I suppose. When I was at school, I played Wrath in our performance of
Doctor Faustus.
‘Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it’—that’s what Mephistopheles says. Anything forever in darkness is Hell, I fancy, but there can be well-lit Hells, too. Purgatory, don’t you see, Marina, is all about us; you may encounter purgatorial figures any day, don’t you know, without recognizing them. ‘Purgatory’ doesn’t signify punishment, essentially-purging, cleansing, rather. Hell is torment; Purgatory, suffering, but with hope, and it’s not all suffering. Most of us aren’t fit for Heaven, uncleansed creatures that we are; we’d not be content with unchanging perfection; we’re restless.

“So Purgatory’s not merely the best that most of us can expect, for ever so long, but also actually the state that most of us prefer. The purgatorial soul may experience the pangs of death over and over again-yet cheerfully enough, knowing that the end won’t be down below.”

Marina listened wide-eyed. Why, what she had expected to learn from Apollinax, she was hearing from this kilted tramp! “Where did you learn all this, Coriolan?” She didn’t feel in the least sleepy now. “Go on talking! If the Weem wasn’t Purgatory, what was it?”

Coriolan nodded toward the far side of this room: now Marina noticed that the flagstones had been lifted from a narrow space there. “If we sift the old legends, I suppose we can say that Saint Nectan’s Weem, or the Purgatory down there, was a place of confinement for the essences of certain people who had entrapped or entombed themselves: the conscious if disembodied essences. I suppose that all truly haunted houses are such traps. Just as the Fettinch Moss, so close to us, is a bog of earthly quicksand-well, there are bogs of moral quicksand. Down one sinks!” He made a grisly choking, gobbling noise in his lean throat; Marina cried out.

“Forgive me, Marina: one might as well laugh as cry. I mean this: the Weem may be a repository of sunken souls.” What a quaint phrase! “You mean,” said Marina, “you mean that we’re sitting here over Hell?”

“Over
a
hell, conceivably. There are many hells, and the same place may be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon the situation. Most of them are private. Do you know, when I was a boy, people about here used to call the Lodging “Balgrummo’s Hell”? They were thinking of the last Lord Balgrummo. Surely this spot, above ground or beneath, was hell for poor Alec Balgrummo, dead or alive. Well, when one goes down the ladder into that drain over there, and then proceeds through a tunnel to the Weem’s entrance—why, one can’t blame Sweeney greatly for his distraught state, even though he keeps telling himself that there’s no Hell anywhere, and never has been.”

If anyone less iron-nerved and soft-voiced than this Coriolan had been saying all this to her, Marina might have gone into a screaming fit like the Fraulein’s. Shiver though she did, Marina was entranced by Coriolan’s flow of talk. How could any modern man be so certain of things?

“And if there are many hells,” she inquired, “are there as many purgatories?” What an odd nocturnal conversation! Yet what else could she do than talk with this man?

He gave her a long impassive look. “Why do you ask me that?”

She was flustered. What was his objection? “Shouldn’t I?”

Perhaps she was boring him by too much questioning, and certainly Coriolan must be dog-tired after digging away below all day and most of the night. More nonsense, Lewis Carroll’s nonsense again, flooded into her head:

‘I have answered three questions, and that is enough,’

Said his father; ‘don’t give yourself airs!

Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?

Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!’

She trusted that Coriolan wouldn’t kick her down stairs—not down to the Weem.

His smile returned. “It’s natural enough, Marina, your question. But how can I... Here, you’ll fancy yourself in Purgatory if you don’t get a few hours’ sleep, and this damp cellar is no place for that baby of yours. They must have cleared out of your room by this time; and if the Archvicar has Sweeney in charge, your admirer won’t return tonight. You needn’t dread the Archvicar, by the way: the Inchburns were all men of blood, but not ravishers of women. If the Third Laird hadn’t cherished his Bohemian enchantress excessively, he might have ended elsewhere than under this house. No, in general the Inchburns were uxorious, not lecherous.”

Marina had forgotten what “uxorious” meant, if ever she had known. Did it signify some strange vice? But she was yawning, too sleepy now to ask for a definition, and perhaps it was as well not to know.

“If you’ve no objection, I’ll show you up and reconnoiter on your behalf, Marina,” Coriolan was saying. “I’ll go up first, if that’s all right-and up your privy stair, not the main one. I’m told that the Master doesn’t care to have me above stairs. Do I disquiet him, for some reason? I’m wretchedly got up, true, a thing of rags and patches. But let that be. Up we go!”

With Coriolan’s torch, the narrow stair was less fearsome. Leaping up ahead of her, Coriolan vanished round the turn of the spiral. Irrationally, this disappearance distressed her. “Coriolan! Are you there, are you there? Oh, please...” She stumbled on a steep riser, scrabbled against the wall, nearly fell backward, recovered herself. “Oh, Captain Bain!” Had he dashed right up to the stair head? Had he really preceded her? Had they two really talked?

Yet she caught up with him by her privy door; he unbolted it, and they entered.

“All clear,” said Coriolan. The furniture had been knocked about, but Michael’s venerable cradle was intact, and Marina’s bed seemed like an old friend.

“You’ll sleep well now,” Coriolan assured her. “If ever you’re in need, seek far enough below, and you’ll find me.” He was fastening her outer door somehow.

“May I say something silly?” Marina asked. He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Coriolan-why, what I want to say is, I wish I had met you years ago, when I was Deborah Fitzgerald.”

Having said that, she blushed furiously. “Oh, that wasn’t quite what I wanted to come out. I mean to say, you make me think of my father, the General, even if you don’t look like him—the way he was when we lived in Lincolnshire.”

“Deborah Fitzgerald?” Coriolan stared at her. He had been wedging her door ingeniously with big nails he had produced from his sporran; now he turned to face her squarely.

“I suppose that I shouldn’t have mentioned my old name. I forgot that I’m to be Marina and you’re to be Coriolan, though you reminded me a little while ago. I’m sorry.” Why was he staring so?

“Your father is General Percy Fitzgerald, with a place in Lincolnshire?”

“Yes. Why, did you know him?”

There came a silence. Then Coriolan said, “I served under him in Africa. How does General Fitzgerald do?”

“Didn’t you hear? He died more than two years ago, after years of being sick.”

“I hadn’t known, Deborah Fitzgerald. I wander, you understand, and there’s much that passes me by. You’re quite alone now?”

“Except for dear Michael here.”

“Possibly that’s why I was drawn here.” Coriolan stood still as a statue, a ragged statue.

What did he mean? And who had said to her, recently, that there are no coincidences?

Coriolan seemed lost in reverie; he shook his head as if to clear his wits, then took her hand and placed it between his big, hard, scratched hands. “Like the Inchburns, Deborah Fitzgerald, I can be good at need-though it’s their family motto, not mine. No one did more for me than your father. Well, then, it’s Deborah and Ralph Bain in this room, Marina and Coriolan elsewhere. If I can serve you, send for me below stairs. Good night, Deborah.”

She hurried over to watch him descend the hidden stair; but before she could get her head round the corner, he had vanished silently. Where had he been all her life, and where would he go?

The huge face, more leonine than human but not merely bestial, stared at them from the low bronze door, barring passage into the Weem. A serpent hung over the creature’s forehead, as if about to crawl between this being’s fangs into his mouth. This hideous relief was admirably executed in bronze, and ancient.

“The medieval pilgrims will have taken this thing for a demon,” the Archvicar said, “but actually this is a representation of a god: Kronos, Lord of Time-or rather, Time himself, Father Time, giver of life, giver of death. This bronze panel seems to be classical work, riveted to a later bronze door. Though standing subject to correction, I think it’s Mithraic. Was the Weem made into a Mithraeum late in the second century, perhaps? The ninth Lord Balgrummo thought so, from scanty evidences; this face would have convinced him, had he ever got down here. How did the panel come here? Was it left by Roman legionaries, votaries of Mithra? Kronos was great in the Mithraic pantheon. Or did Picts fetch the panel back from some raid south of Hadrian’s Wall? We’ll never know. Well, presently we must see whether old Kronos will consent to let us enter the Weem-or to leave it, once inside.”

“I’d just as soon he said no to the first question,” Sweeney muttered.

Sweeney, Coriolan, and the Archvicar stood in the smashed vestibule of Saint Nectan’s Weem, cluttered with blocks of stone fallen from its vaulted ceiling. They confronted a wall of rock, neatly quarried to smoothness, but with cracks and pits from some great explosion upon its face. Sweeney’s poor head still ached badly, and his stomach too, despite his having slept until noon. It had been a piece of luck that Apollinax hadn’t come below stairs for a second inspection of their labors, while Sweeney had been sleeping off the
kalanzi
and the drubbing he had taken from the Archvicar and the Sicilian girl. A stick-on bandage ran across Sweeney’s slashed eyebrows; that could be explained away to Apollinax, should he inquire, as a bad rock cut. Sick though he felt, Sweeney had been pressed back into service by the pseudo-Archvicar, Manfred Arcane, as hard a master as Apollinax himself. Had Sweeney exchanged King Log for King Stork? Yet be thankful for small favors, Sweeney: this bronze door to the Weem was locked, so for the present, at least, he’d not be thrust into the dead abyss beyond. The ghastly bronze face of this demon or god, with the serpent about to enter into him, was sufficient in itself to give Sweeney the D.T.’s.

Despite Gerontion’s protestations of debility, Apollinax had sent the Archvicar into the underground workings this afternoon. Phlebas had assisted him down the ladder and through the tunnel from the drain to the vestibule. The Archvicar had been commanded to devise a way of opening the small bronze door: they must be within the Weem by tomorrow, Wednesday.

The three of them were alone in this perilous stone antechamber or vestibule: the acolyte-boys, being of no help at present, had been sent back upstairs to participate in a certain drill directed by Apollinax. Phlebas kept watch in the tunnel from the drain, to make sure that no one should come upon them suddenly. Coriolan and Sweeney still were to address Arcane as “Archvicar,” pretending that he was the old poisoner who had been called Gerontion; for if Apollinax should learn of the deception, everything would fall apart.

“I don’t know much of such matters,” Coriolan was saying, “but surely that keyhole and lock can’t be Roman.”

The marvelous bronze door was recessed nearly two feet into massive gray sandstone, and apparently the door opened inward upon the Weem. It would have been ferocious labor to try to break away the rock which surrounded the door-and highly dangerous, for the shattered vaulting of the ruined vestibule hung above their heads like the sword of Damocles, and vibrations alone might bring the stones down upon them. Yet this ancient door, which had no handle, would not yield-not even quiver when they thrust against it. At the right-hand side of the door was a large keyhole, with no way of getting at the bolt beyond.

“That lock is sixteenth-century work,” the Archvicar answered, “probably German: a masterpiece of its kind. Who fitted it to the door? Perhaps that Bohemian alchemist, the father of the Third Laird’s mistress or wife-the man who seems to have been destroyed in an explosion down here, a few days before Morton stormed the Lodging. If we had acetylene torches, which we don’t, we might try to cut through the metal around the lock; but Apollinax believes this bronze panel of Kronos to be bound up with the mysteries of the Weem, and he doesn’t mean to have the genius of the place disturbed, if it can be helped.”

Sweeney had shown the door to Apollinax the previous day, when Apollinax had come down for his first tour of inspection. The Master had seemed intensely happy at the sight of the strange leonine face upon the panel-happy for the first time since Sweeney had known him. “Kronos, who devours all things!” he had murmured. “The Lord of empty eternity, where nothing stays, nothing vanishes! I knew I had sought out the right place.”