Lord of the Hollow Dark (27 page)

“For God’s sake, don’t!” Sweeney stammered, leaping up. “Aha! Have I converted an unbeliever? Well, my friends,” the Archvicar said, slipping back into his old decrepit posture and leaning on his stick, “the time has come for me to hobble above stairs and fetch down that great ominous key to our demon-god’s lair.”

“Right away?”

“Not immediately, no: I shall have to talk with Apollinax first. Yet I think we may count upon an expedition tonight; indeed, Apollinax probably will insist upon it, whether or not he comes along.”

“But you haven’t told us what we’re going to do tomorrow night, Ash Wednesday night, or before then,” Sweeney protested passionately. “You said you’d try to get us all out of this.”

The Archvicar turned to Coriolan, courteously. “Have you any suggestions?”

“I don’t make decisions,” Coriolan said, “not now. I drift.”

“As the spirit moves you?”

Coriolan looked into the Archvicar’s eyes: “As the spirit moves me.”

The Archvicar bowed his head slightly, and looked at Sweeney. “And you, my friend, perhaps you have a scheme?”

“Your girl has a long knife, and Coriolan here has a short one. We could all go down to the pend...”

“Though I’m a man of blood,” the pseudo-Archvicar told him, “I came to this place unarmed, guessing that we would contend more against dominations and powers than against flesh and blood. I still do not believe that I erred in my calculations. Besides, your design wouldn’t save us: all of those devil-boys have guns. And then, what would we have to say to the police, afterward, if it should turn out that Apollinax’s ‘liturgy’ was to be a mere piece of superstitious foolery, no physical harm worked, after all? No, we shall have to wait the event. Well, I am preparing a plan for us—risky, and it may not please you, and it’s incomplete as yet. But I shall give you the details in time, perhaps tonight. Do you ever pray, Sweeney? Do try it, now or never.”

High up the Den, not far from the sheer wall over which burst the torrent of the Fettinch Water, Marina came upon a walled garden. In its ogival-arched gateway were hung gates of iron elaborately wrought in a mazelike pattern, now rusting away. Peering through those gates, she saw a larger-than-life statue standing on an artificial islet, with the divided burn flowing furiously on either side.

This was a marble effigy of Father Time, scythe and all, baroque sculpture more than two centuries old. The roaring Fettinch Water entered this garden through another broad low arch at the opposite end of the enclosure; she was staring in from a gateway in the south wall. From either side of the burn, humpbacked bridges of stone led to Father Time’s tiny domain.

Although wildly grown up to weeds, this forgotten walled garden, so Scottish, was the most lovely spot in the policies of Balgrummo Lodging. Marina could see that it had been a rose garden, for the leafless stems of climbing rosebushes still clung to the inner sides of the stone dykes. Could she enter?

She tugged hard at one side of the heavy gate; its hinges groaned. She put Michael in his blanket upon the ground by an outcrop of limestone, and tugged still harder, until she persuaded the gate to yield sufficiently for her to squeeze through with Michael in her arms. She seated herself, panting, upon the crumbling balustrade of one of those humpbacked bridges-rather a scary spot, with the burn rushing beaneath her, but she needed some minutes’ rest.

She was quite alone with her baby. It had been a hard climb up the Den’s overgrown paths, Michael being a fat baby now, but she had rested along the way. She had not wanted that old lady and the Sicilian girl-whatever their real names were-for company; she didn’t know how far to trust them, and she must think in solitude, as far from the Lodging as she might get.

The chanting had driven her out of the house. Mr. Apollinax had taken all the disciples and most of the acolytes into the chapel, but she had not been invited to participate; obviously she hadn’t been accepted as a disciple, after all, for the Master had ignored her except for their one brief unsatisfactory interview yesterday. Perhaps that was as well, considering the character of the other disciples. Then what was she to be, tomorrow night? And where was she to turn when they all should leave here?

Sitting in her room with these worries in her head, she had heard the disciples’ chant drift upward to her, despite the thick interior walls and the contrived corridors of Balgrummo Lodging. They must have been shouting at the top of their lungs. She could not make out the words.

Where had she heard it before? Was it plainsong, and did she recall it from some church before the electric guitars came in? No, not that. Now she knew! It seemed to be the very chant which those naked people wearing beast-masks had sung in her nightmare of the underground hall! Of course that couldn’t be: sometimes you think you are recalling things from your dreams, when actually the events of real life are only vaguely similar to some earlier dream sequence.

No, that couldn’t be. Yet she had preferred not to listen to that chant, and so had gone out a rear door of the Lodging, unchallenged by anyone, and up the Den. For one thing, she needed to think hard about Mr. Apollinax.

The walls of this rose garden kept off the wind, and it was a clear day: she was glad she had come here. She scrutinized the Figure of Father Time, with his hourglass at his belt, his terrible scythe brandished high. How skeletal he seemed in his flowing stone drapery! Was he the same as Death, the grim reaper? Immobile though he was here, and looking away from her toward the Lodging, still Father Time made Marina uneasy in this stillness.

Why, this rose garden could have been a graveyard. What a macabre thought to come into her head! Could this spot enclosed by ancient dykes indeed have been the old monks’ graveyard? Now why did she fancy that, without evidence?

Or was there evidence? She looked about her. The area enclosed by these ancient walls was large, remarkably large for a rose garden, more like that of an orchard. The garden sloped upward, toward the terminal cliff of the den head. This lower part of the garden apparently had been laid out, rather in French fashion, late in the eighteenth century-or so she judged by the almost-obliterated formal walks, the remnants of tiny hedges, the little bridges, and the Gallic Father Time. Could the lower garden have been a hedge-maze, once? But the upper part of the garden looked quite different, overgrown and rocky, with two yew trees at its upper corners, and a third yew overhanging a rather low, roofless structure set in the middle of the wild upper portion of the walled area.

The roofless building drew her: she clambered to it through brambles and bracken, Michael cooing contentedly.

The small ruined building was Scots Gothic-real Gothic, of course, not Gothic Revival. The walls and tracery of the windows were virtually intact; indeed, this picturesque ruin seemed to have had its masonry pointed in recent years. She entered; of course the door had vanished long ago.

Why, this must have been a burial chapel, or chapel of ease, or something of that sort! There was a great slab tomb, probably fourteenth-century work, raised upon mossy limestone masonry about two feet above the level of the pavement. Barbarous Latin characters had been inscribed upon it hundreds of years ago, but the lettering was so strange that it might as well have been ogham writing; and anyway, the rains and snows of many, many years had so worn the face of the limestone slab that most of the inscription was indecipherable. It did seem to be the tomb of a prior-perhaps the first prior?—to judge by three or four words she could just make out. It had some worn ornamental carving in each corner, too: she bent close to study it; perhaps she would come up one day and make a tracing or rubbing. The sun came out again: now she could see the designs better. In the upper left-hand corner, an hourglass; in the upper right-hand corner, a sickle or scythe; in the lower left-hand corner, a skeletal Death with a dart; in the lower right-hand corner, a multifoliate rose.

These sepulchral symbols were conventional enough; she had seen them often in old Lincolnshire churchyards. Yet in this solitary place of ruin, with the tall statue of Time lower down in the graveyard or garden, they had a strong pathos. Now what was this carving, on the lower part of the tomb slab, obscured by lichen? It was a later inscription, although very old in itself, deeply cut, with some abstract design, it seemed, just above it. She had in her pocket a nail file; she used it now to scrape at moss and lichen. The Latin characters of this later carving were easier to recognize. She spelled the lines out:

IBANT OBSCURI SOLA SUB NOCTE PER UMBRAM

PERQUE DOMOS DITIS VACUAS ET INANIA REGNA

She summoned up her schoolgirl Latin; the classics mistress had found her a fair pupil. Was this Vergil? In substance, these lines told of a nocturnal journey through the shadowy realm of Dis, vacant and lifeless.

Did the design just above have some connection with this inscription? She scraped away at concentric circles. But not concentric circles only: also straight lines traversing the circles, and then short segmental curved lines within the circles, and at the heart of the design a round empty space.

Abruptly it came to her what all this was: the representation of a labyrinth! It was no map or plan, simply a conventional medieval maze, such as still could be found in tiles or stones on the floors of a few surviving medieval churches, signifying perhaps the tortuous path to salvation. She never had seen any symbol of this sort on a tombstone before, although with the General in his latter years she had poked about innumerable cemeteries. And she thought at once of the Weem, somewhere deep below this spot.

That thought distressed her. She scrambled up from beside the prior’s tomb with a certain aversion, and made her way out of the roofless building. Might there be other gravestones?

Yes: still higher, she could see a large upright stone tablet, a few rods away, looking down like a sentinel upon the little medieval chapel. She reached it without difficulty. This tall stone must have been erected in recent years, surprisingly, for little lichen grew upon it. A modest decorative border was carved round its edges, and deeply graven in the middle of the stone were Roman characters:

TAMEN AD MORES NATURA RECURRIT

DAMNATOS FIXA ET MUTARI NESCIA

Could this be, “But our nature, fixed, unchangeable, turns back to condemned ways?” The “damnatos” was distressing, here at Balgrummo Lodging-though of course in Roman times the word couldn’t have signified what it does in Christian theology.

The wind swooped down upon her from the den head, chill, carrying along with it a few drops of spray from the waterfall, to which she stood quite close now.

Might there be another inscription on the far side of this tall stone? There was:

HIC JACET ALEXANDER FILLAN INCHBURN

FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNO

NOCTES ATQUE DIES PATET ATRIJANUA DITIS

SED REVOCARE GRADUM SUPERASQUE EVADERE AD AURAS

HOC OPUS HIC LABOR EST

This surely was Vergil: “Easy is the descent to Avernus; the gates of Dis stand open night and day; but to ascend that slope, back to the light, is a work of much travail.” Marina felt proud of her rendering, even though it didn’t rhyme.

Was the last Balgrummo buried here? And had he ordered those dreadful lines to be inscribed there—about himself? Well, he had chosen a peaceful spot, from which one could overlook—if one had vision—a vast long prospect of the rose garden, the Den, the Fettinch Water, the Lodging, the Moss, the trees beyond, with no glimpse of anything ugly. It was as if he were on watch... for what, for whom?

But Marina could not trouble herself with such inquiries. It was almost warm in this corner, between tombstone and garden dyke, and she had slept little last night. Why, she could stretch out in her cloak upon the heather, thick here, with Michael lying upon her. She did...

“Lend me your hand,” someone said.

She did so.

“Lend me your ears,” someone said.

She did so.

“Lend me your eyes,” someone said.

She did so.

His white beard brushed her cheek as he rose to his full height.

“You are quite safe just now,” he said. “It is others I look for.”

She could not reply.

He stood beside her, tall, tall, tall. “The virtue works slowly,” he said, “but it comes. Keep your child from those who sharpen the tooth of the dog.”

Then he was gone, without trace.

But two things bent over her. One was a crocodile, the other a leopard.

“She must be told now,” said the Crocodile.

“Can she bear it?” asked the Leopard.

“She is the daughter of a brave man,” said the Crocodile.

“Will she go into the hollow dark with us?” asked the Leopard.

“There is no other way,” said the Crocodile.

Something was placed upon her forehead. She woke shrieking...

“Now, now, Marina, don’t let them hear you down at the Lodging,” Madame Sesostris was telling her. She patted Marina’s cold hand. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you; we thought that perhaps you’d been locked away somewhere.”

Marina pulled her wits together. She had been dreaming here in the walled garden. The baby! Oh, Fresca was standing there, too, holding Michael. Marina snatched him back.

“I had one of my own,” Fresca said, with a flitting smile, in perfect English.

“I suppose I should present you, Marina,” Madame Sesostris said. “This young lady’s name is not really Fresca, and she isn’t really my maid. She’s called Melchiora, actually, and she is the wife of His Excellency Manfred Arcane; but we’d best continue to call him the Archvicar and her Fresca, for the present.”

Something else topsy-turvy! Marina stared at the old lady: “Then who are you?”

“An old friend of theirs, and I keep the keys for His Excellency and Melchiora at their house in Haggat. I’m Grizel Fergusson, but of course you’re not to tell anyone that. Mr. Arcane needed someone hideous and withered to impersonate Gerontion’s wife-though she’s dead, actually, of natural causes. So I was fetched here as a reasonable facsimile.”