Lord of the Hollow Dark (3 page)

The Archvicar rubbed thumb and forefinger together-a frequent gesture of his that Sweeney recalled from the Haggat evening. “From Vice-Premier M’Rundu, anything in Hamnegri can be bought for a price. He took every franc I had, except for passage money. As you may have suspected, friend Sweeney, I had done well enough during my Haggat years, despite my lifelong relish for gaming. Lost, all my hoard lost to M’Rundu! So now I am Apollinax’s hireling attendant lord, swelling his progress: an easy tool, deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, and meticulous. Forget my quondam name, remembering always to call me Geron-tion: ‘I am an old man, a dull head among windy spaces.’”

“I shouldn’t have expected that they’d have been so rough on you in a country where half the people eat hashish.”

“Ah, but the charge was murder: the unfortunate death of some of those beggars on whom I tested dosages of
kalanzi
at Mr. Apollinax’s insistence. Not once before had I been found guilty of homicide.”

“Not the first time you’d been charged, though?”

“I stand silent. Yet why call this kettle black, friend pot? I have not been imprisoned for rape: I make no war upon women, nor need to.”

Scowling, Sweeney half rose from his chair. “What in hell do you know about that?”

“One conviction of you on that charge, old chap, with a three-year term of imprisonment imposed. If you don’t mind my saying so, it’s a coward’s crime. You do mind? You were paroled at the end of a year, and arrested and charged four other times for offenses against women.”

Sweeney drew in his breath. “Apollinax keeps dossiers?”

“He does indeed.” The Archvicar chuckled softly. “I have seen most of them: cards on all the twelve disciples, on the twelve acolytes, on you, presumably on Grishkin and me. Our mystical Master might have obtained his information out of Interpol, so detailed it is; he moves in labyrinthine ways his wonders to perform.” The Archvicar writhed, perhaps settling his painful spine again, and then resumed.

“But why, dear Sweeney, do we talk of such sordid concerns in so splendid an old house as this? I believe you studied architecture, and a little archaeology, before you were expelled from the university. Is this not a
lovely
dark house? A trifle shabby, I confess, like you and me, but one scarcely notices the ravages of moth and deathwatch beetle when the draperies are drawn.” He swept a supple hand before him, in homage to the grace of this vaulted room.

“It’s damned damp.”

“I suppose it always was, the Fettinch Moss lying so near to the house. But what the old lairds sought was grandeur, not comfort. The last Lord Balgrummo had nothing done in the way of repairs, and there was dry rot in many a room by the time he died. Yet the Balgrummo Trust seems to have patched things up tolerably-out of pious sentiment, I suppose, for we’re the first tenants they’ve found since old Balgrummo came to his end.”

“Is it true that a burglar did him in?”

“
Au contraire,
dear friend: it looked rather as if he had done the burglar in. Very nearly three years ago, the two of them were found cold stone dead in the morning, in different rooms, with no mark of violence on either corpse. The burglar had been a strong man in the prime of life, while of course Lord Balgrummo was past ninety years, some fifty of them spent continuously and compulsorily in this house.”

“I know his dirty story.” Sweeney lit a cigarette. “He tried to raise the devil, literally, and went crazy as a coot, and chopped up a man and a woman about 1913, here in this house. Because he was a peer, they didn’t hang him. What kind of justice was that?”

Sweeney was conscious inwardly of having done certain acts for which
he
still might have been hanged in certain states, had they caught and convicted him. Yet damn all peers and privileges! Damn all in authority, Apollinax included! Still, who but Apollinax would have hired Sweeney, with his dubious credentials and more than doubtful record? Who but Apollinax would have engaged such a grisly old toad as this “Gerontion”? So he supposed that the pair of them ought to be grateful to Apollinax, demanding though that master was.

“What kind of justice?” the Archvicar echoed him. “
Lex talionis
, retributive justice, my dear Sweeney. Balgrummo gave his word never to leave Balgrummo Lodging, which meant that he consented to spend the rest of his life in his own peculiar hell, Balgrummo’s Hell. There existed also peculiar, if not extenuating, circumstances here when Balgrummo did what he did in 1913: like Gilles de Rais, he was as much victim as monster. Balgrummo took a great while dying. Do you fancy, Sweeney, that Balgrummo’s with us still, in spirit? Alone out in that corridor some minutes ago, you seemed ill at ease.”

Sweeney snorted. “I take Apollinax’s cash, but I don’t buy his game.” He glanced about the long room: all the doors were shut. “You can have the spirit, and I’ll take the flesh.”

“So you acknowledge no ghosts, Mr. Apeneck Sweeney? None of those ‘Timeless Moments’ for you, eh? No duality? We’re worms’ meat merely, you maintain?” The Archvicar lifted his head and leaned forward pontifically. “Why, think so still, Apeneck, till experience teach otherwise.”

“If there were a Hell, you’d rot in it,” Sweeney told him, resentfully.

“That’s not our gospel according to Apollinax, my friend, not the wisdom of Apollinax, with ‘his laughter submarine and profound.’ Don’t you trust in our benefactor Mr. Apollinax, with his dry and passionate talk?”

The old man’s tone was equable. Was he mocking altogether? It continued, that insinuating voice of Archvicar Gerontion, faintly unctuous.

“I grant you, Sweeney, that our Master seems to be polishing rough diamonds, this lot we have with us on the present occasion. Excepting yourself and myself-if you’il concede me an exception, provisionally, for the sake of argument-and my own entourage, and presumably Miss Marina and her baby, why, everyone in this house tonight is corrupt, thoroughly depraved, as if in demonstration of pure Augustinian doctrine. Of course I don’t mean to include Apollinax him-self-salaam, salaam-in my indictment.

“Why has he chosen such unlikely candidates for redemption? Why give
them
the Timeless Moment? I pride myself upon my memory, and I recall their dossiers.”

“For instance?”

“Why, my friend, take the faded demi-rep upon whom Apollinax has bestowed the name of Madame de Tornquist: she has played about with black spells, poisoning her husband in the course of one of them. Take that elderly Oriental gentleman, fancier of small lovely things, who passes under the name of Hakagawa: he has been a Napoleon of abortion mills. But I grow garrulous. Strong though my stomach is, it would sicken me to run through the roster of tonight’s lodgers in this Lodging. Corrupt, all corrupt; unblemished turpitude, delightful phrase.” He sank back into the sofa, laying his stick across his knees.

“Do I include voluptuous Grishkin, whose former name I happen to know—although, unlike many others, I have not known her carnally? I do include her, Apollinax’s own darling Coppelia doll. ‘She’s a dead thing, or never was alive.’ Like the French queen, she could keep her lovers’ hearts in bottles. All this being so, then why our ingenue Miss Marina, more sinned against than sinning? Why, in heaven’s name, her baby boy?”

Archvicar Gerontion’s soft voice had turned sibilant. He raised his thick white eyebrows in animated inquiry, slid a hand inside his waistcoat to draw forth a cigar, lit it ceremoniously. “Burma cheroot, my Apeneck friend, the only true cigar. One for you? No? Your vile cigarettes will drag you to a coughing horror of a death.”

“Apollinax pays you and pays me,” Sweeney told him. “Why all this fuss about his clients? The old ladies love his hocus-pocus, and it doesn’t hurt them to pay for it. So long as he rakes in the cash, what’s it to you and me?”

“Disciple of dirty Diogenes, your cynicism doesn’t probe deep enough.” The Archvicar puffed upon his cheroot. “Behold in me an old man, a profound skeptic, who transcended mere cynicism epochs ago. I have dwelt amidst dangers for many decades, and have got my bread by most hazardous occupations, and yet have kept a whole skin. I know humanity. I know Apollinax for something other than a money-grubbing charlatan.”

A little ash fell upon his waistcoat. Producing a delicate silk handkerchief, the Archvicar brushed it carefully away, not ceasing to talk.

“Penny-dreadful things were done in this house when I was young. I know, for I am the last person left who was concerned in them. That is one reason why Apollinax values me, and he asks me many a searching question about what precisely was done here, and how. Oh, I had no direct hand in those doings; I was a silly spectator of the lesser things, a dilettante in the occult, no adept. Well, then, Apollinax asks too many such questions. I do not propose, if it can be helped, to repeat the follies of a misspent youth.”

“Is somebody coming?” Sweeney broke in. They listened for a moment.

“In Haggat they did not damage my eardrums,” the Archvicar resumed. “One might hear anything in this house, but that was not the sound of footsteps. I repeat: why fetch this ingenuous Marina here, why her baby? They don’t share the jaded appetites of our other lodgers, and they have no money to contribute to our common fund, which can afford to pay a large rent for Balgrummo Lodging and to post a huge bond against damage. What are Marina and tiny Michael expected to give to this ‘gathering,’ this ‘retreat’? I feel misgivings.”

The Archvicar’s face, ordinarily so bland, showed lines of perplexity. “Is this house harmless, quite disarmed?” the old man asked.

He gestured toward the walls of this handsome grand room. They were hung with the remains of a collection of weapons, chiefly African and Asiatic: the remains only, for, as Sweeney now noticed, every chased or jeweled scabbard was empty; axes and pikes were missing from their mountings or deprived of their heads; the shields and pieces of body armor looked lonely.

“The police took away all edged weapons the morning after Balgrummo’s Trouble,” Gerontion explained, “and they are locked in some Edinburgh vault, rusting, as Lord Balgrummo was left to rust here. Nothing remained with which the last lord might rend flesh and bone. But even now, is this house quite innocuous? You and I have our own skins to think of. For Apollinax, whatever he means to do here, are you and I expendable? Why Marina and the baby? Unriddle me these riddles, Herr Doktor Apeneck Sweeney.”

Then a door creaked. The Archvicar’s accustomed blandness of expression fell back upon his face like an old-fangled gutta-percha mask. Sweeney swung round in his chair.

Grishkin of the opulent figure had entered the upper end of the drawing room. “The Master is with you,” she announced, unsmiling.

Sweeney covertly assessed her, part by part: such a woman would have no scruples, but she was not soft enough for him. The Archvicar’s “Coppelia doll” image had been apt. Sweeney preferred shrieking innocence.

“Dear lady, at your coming we crawl between dry ribs to keep our metaphysics warm,” the Archvicar told her, struggling to rise with the aid of his stick. Grishkin stared at him with a slight frown of puzzlement, and withdrew as Apollinax came forward into the firelight.

Apollinax wore evening dress: probably the first time it had been worn in the house since 1913, Sweeney reflected irrelevantly. The flickering fire on the hearth played upon Apollinax’s curious face.

“Archvicar, Mr. Sweeney,” Apollinax said in his resonant voice, which seemed to bubble up from depths, “no ceremony just now, if you please. You may seat yourselves.”

Apollinax took a straight severe chair which might have come down from the age of John Knox. His large eyes glowed like the fire’s embers. “You are tired,” he began, “but there’s much to explain. You are to memorize all details. Listen to me, without comment, for ten minutes of instruction.”

Somehow Apollinax had always looked unfinished, Sweeney had thought more than once. The skin of Apollinax’s face was like a baby’s. He was a small man, smaller than the Archvicar, so that one was surprised to hear that resonant, if sometimes high-pitched, voice of his. His little ears were rather conspicuously pointed. He was so very civilized-and yet one could fancy him peering from behind an ilex in some Greek forest. Now why did that odd image pop into Sweeney’s head? To talk with Apollinax-or, usually, to listen to him—was like a confrontation with a clever and alarming fetus. Physically, Apollinax was infantile, or something less than that; intellectually, he was old, old, the old man of the sea, or perhaps of the mountain.

The Master spoke to them as if old Kronos had been at his back. Now and again Apollinax paused briefly, although tolerating no interruption. And when he paused, he smiled at them in his peculiar way, an expression not unpleasant but not reassuring. It passed through Sweeney’s mind that the smile of Apollinax was noticeably like the curious compressed smiles upon the faces of statues of archaic Hellas.

For all the energy of his talk, Apollinax told them nothing but administrative details. This gathering was to last no more than six days. No one was to leave the house during its progress, except perhaps for a stroll in the policies, and then only to the back of the Lodging, up the Den. Apollinax would require some architectural advice and practice from Sweeney; from the Archvicar, certain researches in the Muniment Room, and officiating in a liturgy on Ash Wednesday night.

Grishkin, assigned to general superintendence of the young staff, would communicate routine instructions. All participants in this retreat would be required to observe a certain decorum, satisfying themselves with simple foods, abstaining from other pleasures of the flesh. No intoxicants would be served. All would take dinner together. Gerontion and Sweeney must complete all their preparations by Wednesday, no matter how hard and long they must work meanwhile. Prompt and accurate compliance with fuller instructions, to be given tomorrow and Monday, would be expected and enforced.

Apollinax’s sentences, as Gerontion had suggested, were dry and passionate, despite the mundaneness of what he told them. He said no word of the Timeless Moment.