Lord of the Hollow Dark (24 page)

He had ordered the Archvicar to see that the door be opened this day: when the Master decreed a thing, that thing must be done in the appointed time. Sweeney wondered why the Archvicar did not seem more urgently concerned about the problem of the door.

“We might try to make a wax impression of the lock,” Sweeney offered, “but we haven’t any way of casting a key.” If a locksmith should have to be brought from Edinburgh, he reflected, there would be some chance for sending word to the police that things were wrong at the Lodging—some faint chance.

“There may be no need for anything of that sort,” the Archvicar answered him. “I have seen the key that we need, if I’m not mistaken.”

“What, lying about in an odd corner, a key four hundred years old?” Coriolan asked.

“Not an odd corner, my friend: I came upon the thing at the bottom of a very secret hidie-hole, containing old charts, in Lord Balgrummo’s study at the top of the tower-and left it there, not knowing then what it was meant to open. But the key I found is modern: Balgrummo must have encountered our present difficulty when he came upon this door, and had a key made-taking the lock’s impression himself, of course, he not wanting any pawky Edinburgh tradesman down here.”

“Alec Balgrummo had talent for everything under sun or moon,” Coriolan observed, “or so my father used to say. Will you send up for the key now?”

“By no means.” The Archvicar seated himself upon the lowest step of the broad Pilgrims’ Stair, the foot of which protruded from masses of rubble brought down by the Warlock Laird’s gunpowder; higher up, the Stair must be blocked even more thoroughly by whatever had been done to seal it in 1500. “I don’t wish anyone but myself to pry into Balgrummo’s study. Besides, we require some time to hatch plots. Apollinax will take it that we’re busying ourselves with the lock; meanwhile, we three mice will play.”

In this relative security underground, Arcane had discarded his pretense of infirmity: undisguised, the Archvicar was a vigorous, erect man, sinewy, as Sweeney had learned to his cost. Also Arcane had dropped the chi-chi tone from his speech. What an actor he had been, all this while in the Lodging!

Sweeney knew who Manfred Arcane was, although he never had set eyes on him in Hamnegri. The natives in Haggat sometimes had called Arcane “the Father of Shadows.” His formal title was “Minister without Portfolio to the Hereditary President of Hamnegri”; but
de facto
Arcane was commander of the President-Sultan’s mercenary troops, and also had charge of Hamnegri’s diplomatic relations and oil-contract negotiations. He had other functions, too-among them, magisterial jurisdiction in cases of appeal by foreigners from decisions by Hamnegrian courts. It may have been this latter function that had put Arcane on to that old toad Gerontion’s operations.

But why Arcane had impersonated Archvicar Gerontion and troubled himself to travel all the way to Balgrummo Lodging, Sweeney had only a foggy notion. In Marina’s room, last night, the pseudo-Archvicar had given Sweeney a brief sketch of his purposes. He had bullied Sweeney ruthlessly; had exhorted him, too; had made him large promises of redemption—not Apollinax’s kind of redemption—if he would pull himself together and work with them for their common salvation here at the Lodging. Sweeney had surrendered unconditionally, promising amendment: this was his only chance for escape from Apollinax, and if anybody could give a fellow a hand up, this Manfred Arcane could.

It was Arcane who, as gray eminence, had crushed the Marxist revolt in Hamnegri, ten years ago. No one knew much about Arcane, except that he was rich, powerful, and seemingly omniscient. It wasn’t even sure whether Arcane was a European or some sort of North African. This Father of Shadows, it was said, had come to Hamnegri at the President-Sultan’s invitation, not long after the French colonial administration had ceased. One journalist of the Left had called Arcane “the most dangerous man in Africa.” Almost never had he been seen in public. Yet here he was in this frightful cave, lighting a cheroot, this fabulous figure from Africa, this deadly man who had held a knife to Sweeney’s throat last night!

Coriolan was speaking. “Meanwhile, how does the Master busy himself? I’ve seen him only twice since I fell in here, and he wasn’t cordial at those encounters.” Coriolan had sat down upon a great stone fallen from the vaulting overhead. “I suspect that he doesn’t know what to make of me.”

He’s not the only one, Sweeney thought. Somehow this man in the kilt still seemed-well, preternatural. But without Coriolan’s skill and strength, it would have been impossible to have progressed this far in the underground work; for that matter, Sweeney knew that he might be lying dead now under fallen rocks, if it hadn’t been for Coriolan’s instant help on two occasions at least. Sweeney reflected that he didn’t have a real friend in the world. This Coriolan, or Bain, for all his oddities, could be a friend worth cultivating: tough, humorous, knowledgeable, “good at need”—to borrow the Inchburns’ motto.

The Archvicar was replying to Coriolan: “Our Master is raising his voice on high, leading his chorus.”

“What’s that?”

“He has the disciples and the acolytes-all but two of them at the pend, Sweeney-in the chapel, teaching them the chants that will be sung at the ritual tomorrow night, and imparting to them information which is not for such ears as ours. The exercise seems congenial for him, Apollinax having been a priest once.”

“Rather a musty place for devotions, that chapel?” Coriolan raised his bushy eyebrows inquiringly.

“Musty, dusty, rotten, my friends. A day or two after the last Balgrummo’s death, the trustees had the chapel doors screwed up; no one entered until Apollinax had the screws taken out, three days ago. The room must be riddled by dry rot, woodworm, deathwatch beetle. It has been disused, for that matter, ever since Balgrummo’s Trouble in 1913. There was minor fire damage on that occasion: some of the seven-branched candlesticks were upset in the confusion, caught the draperies, and singed the walls. It’s not a spot I should choose for devotions—or for anything else. Some say that old emotions can be embedded in stones. If that chapel’s stones were to cry out, the bravest man in the world would run from the room.”

“My father said much the same thing,” Coriolan interjected. “Never saw it myself. The old monks’ chapel, was it?”

“Yes, once; but in James II’s time all the Gothic was covered over with baroque pomp and circumstance, and a great circular painting set in the ceiling
—trompe l’oeil,
Saul and the Witch of Endor and Samuel’s ghost, the Witch’s skinny arm and hand stretching forth from the frame, Samuel’s shade seeming to emerge from the plaster, convincing enough to scare a small boy witless if he should stray in. Then, in the last Lord’s time, there was installed as a reredos an enormous cartoon by Fuseli, or more likely some pupil of Fuseli; presumably it’s still there, but carefully covered, as indeed it was in the last Lord’s time. It’s a Golgotha, I understand, but really an inversion of the symbols, an ultimate sacrilege; but enough of that for now.”

Sweeney marveled that the Archvicar and Coriolan could ramble on about the decorative arts, here in this dungeon which might collapse upon them any moment, here in this uncanny house with a lunatic leading his dupes in song somewhere overhead. “What in hell has that got to do with the mess we’re in?” he demanded.

Immediately he regretted having spoken in that tone, knowing now just how summary the pseudo-Archvicar could be in his reprisals, when he chose. But his new master did not seem annoyed. “In hell, Apeneck, a great deal. I’d best paint the background for you, because we contend against powers and dominations, and you need to understand. Coriolan may have something to contribute. You needn’t fret: Apollinax and his angelic choir will divert themselves in the profaned chapel for at least another hour. Bear with me: I’ll tell you something about Alexander Fillan Inchburn, tenth and last Baron Balgrummo.”

“Quite the last?” Coriolan said that with a faint smile.

“Quite the last, a bend sinister still being an insuperable obstacle to succession to a peerage, barring resurrection of an extinct title by Crown in Parliament. And what son born on the wrong side of a blanket would seek to be ennobled so, the peculiar blemish on this title considered?” The Archvicar seemed bland as ever. “No other inquiries? Very well, I give you my tale of a family’s ruin, even though ‘at my back in a cold blast I hear, the rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.’”

The Archvicar paused; looked across the vestibule at the monstrous face in bronze on the little door to the Weem; meditated for what seemed to Sweeney an interminable while; then began in his melodious voice.

“Alexander Fillan Inchburn, who succeeded to his peerage when young, came of a line of masterful men whose considerable intellectual endowments had been subordinated, perhaps fortunately, to their adventurous impulses. From the first Laird of Balgrummo onward, the Inchburns had been soldiers of ability, several of them in the service of foreign princes. Three of them in the eighteenth century, after being partially disabled by wounds or perhaps tiring of the camp, became nabobs-two East Indian variety, one West Indian. Being shrewd Scots, with an eye to the main chance, they did very well indeed out of both war and commerce. A propensity to gaming and grandiose undertakings, nevertheless, might have undone the family, had it not been for the wealth extracted from the Balgrummo Pits.

“For in the hills which you see to the back of the Lodging lay some of the richest coal deposits of Scotland. The mining of coal-or ‘coles,’ as people said then-commenced in these lands before the middle of the sixteenth century, when the monks still held this property. In the beginning, the colliers dug principally in the near vicinity of this house-just above the Den, and in the upper reaches of the Den itself, near the waterfall; one still stumbles occasionally upon the remains of early shafts and vents up there. So it was not altogether surprising that the Third Laird had at summons a considerable body of rough miners to aid him in the defense of the Lodging against the Earl of Morton. The careful drainage of these policies which the monks of the Priory had carried on for centuries doubtless helped mining operations: the colliers encountered few difficulties with underground waters or sudden floods which could not be resolved by the simple hand pumps of the age.

“With the gradual exhaustion of the nearby pits, shafts were sunk higher up the brae, and then in the hills beyond. Early in the eighteenth century, fuel from the Balgrummo mines acquired a high reputation in Holland, where, I am told, the phrase ‘Balgrummo coal’ still is used archaically by oldfangled merchants to describe coal free of shale and earth. Once the steam-powered mine pump was made practical, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the lords of Balgrummo-as they became—greatly increased the production of their pits, so that these Inchburns, despite certain modes of extravagance, found themselves one of the richer noble families of Scotland.

“They spent fortunes upon building and rebuilding. For all the size of this Lodging, they had a still bigger and finer house in Carrick, with three thousand acres about it, and there they spent much of their time-when the lairds and the lords were at home at all. Also they maintained old or new houses, by the nineteenth century, in Deeside, Fife, Sutherland, and Berwickshire. They had a large mansion in the Cowgate of Edinburgh, until the construction of the New Town, when they flitted to one of the finest houses in Charlotte Square. In London, they had first a house on Soho Square, and later on Berkeley Square.

“Balgrummo Lodging, indeed, they visited seldom, for it was never a cheerful residence, and their Edinburgh house was more convenient for the pleasures of the capital. Yet they maintained the Lodging and its policies handsomely, and much embellished the place over the centuries—the splendors, now faded, which you still see. After all, this was the seat of their fortunes; and doubtless the legends of the place had a romantic attraction, especially during the past two centuries, and after Walter Scott referred to the Lodging, under another name, in one of his less-read novels. Gradually they accumulated here the magnificent library, with many rare books, which still is intact. Yet because seldom in residence, they never undertook any extensive demolition of the older portions of the Lodging, modernized it only superficially and in part, and left the house as you find it, an architectural and archaeological curiosity.”

The pseudo-Archvicar paused; contemplated Kronos on the door; resumed.

“A few moments ago I mentioned that the Inchburns kept one eye on the main chance. But the other eye squinted toward the fey, the eldritch, what is now called the occult. This was a forbidden pleasure: they never forgot what price the Third Laird had paid for this sweet-sour taste, and restrained themselves. Nevertheless, they built up here in the library an almost unequaled collection of what booksellers call ‘occulta.’ I believe that some of the line made desultory attempts to discover an entrance to the legendary Weem-desultory, I say, because they were half ashamed and half afraid of this aberration, and employed no qualified experts to direct operations-rejecting even an offer of assistance from the great Robert Adam-and did not wish to damage their ancestral house, with its explosion-shaken foundations.”

Here Sweeney glanced most uneasily at the broken and menacing vaulting above their heads. The Archvicar noticed, nodded, and continued, as if he had all the time in the world.

“Besides, as I remarked, they seldom were in residence: out of sight, out of mind. Since the seventeenth century, the first Inchburn to live here regularly was Alexander Fillan Inchburn, succeeding to the Balgrummo title in 1890.

“At the time of the death of the ninth Baron Balgrummo, young Inchburn was serving with Lugard in the occupation of Uganda, his passion for things African already well developed. He returned to Scotland for three years, settling here in the Lodging and reading much in its library, particularly in the collections concerned with the wilder shores of spirituality. By 1894, he was back with Lugard, active in the taking of Borku, and was later one of Lugard’s chief lieutenants in what is now Nigeria.