Lord of the Hollow Dark (31 page)

Beyond this second doorway, their torches showed them another short passage, its floor sloping sharply downward. Sweeney felt inclined to say something like “I’ll stay here and keep a lookout;” but he found that he dared not remain alone, whatever the dangers ahead of them might be.

They stumbled into a second chamber, larger than the first, it seemed. They were deeper still beneath the Lodging or its policies; the ceiling here was very high.

Hoo-ha! Sweeney had turned his ankle on something, and he was falling in blackness. He splashed heavily into cold water, and it penetrated his mouth and his nose, and he was bubbling and choking and trying to scream for help, and he knew where he was, and it was the cave and the pool of his nocturnal vision, and he was drowning as he had drowned in dream then. Hoo-ha, hoo-ha, hoo-ha! This is what it is to die!

Yet he was dragged out of that pool, with demoniac laughter sounding in his ears. Hands turned him over; the water flowed out of his mouth and nose. “After all, Sweeney, my lad,” the Archvicar’s voice was saying, “that baptismal pool’s less than sixteen inches deep.”

Sitting all soaked and bewildered, Sweeney could see by the torch beams that indeed this was the horrid pool of his vision. His hand encountered something hard—the stalagmite against which he had stumbled, both in his dream and just now.

“Show me the wall,” Sweeney begged, his voice shaking. Someone turned his beam upon the mass of limestone. Back of the pool was a large recess, ear-shaped, in the wall-the recess into which Sweeney had crept, in his vision, as the Dead File had approached.

Sweeney began to hack and sob, cold and wet and fearful that the knocking might commence. Had it been reality a few nights ago, and was it dream now, or the other way round? The thought passed through his brain that all his life, heretofore, he had subsisted by silly shallow mechanistic notions; and now he was ending trapped in a deeper, darker reality.

“Don’t despair, Sweeney: drink the cup that cheers,” someone was saying. With both trembling hands he took the metal cup; it was full of rum, and that drink was the fiercest thing that ever had gone down his gullet, but it took the chill out of him almost at once. He was helped to his feet. With these three steel-nerved friends beside him, perhaps that knocking would not come upon him here, just now.

“A noble thing, over there,” Coriolan was murmuring. Three beams illuminated what Coriolan had detected. This was a rock tomb, or rather a sarcophagus. On three sides the tomb was cut into the rock; but the fourth side, toward them, was an immense slab carved by some early master, perhaps Romano-British, in a style half classical, half barbaric, the symbols of the dying age and the dawning age intermingled. The massive tomb lid, similarly carved, leaned unbroken against the rock wall.

They crossed the cave to the sarcophagus, the Archvicar leading them, tapping with his stick at every step he took. Sweeney tagged behind the other three-yet not far behind.

This tomb, they found, was wholly empty. “This must have been Nectan’s coffin,” the Archvicar declared, almost to himself, in a tone of intense excitement, “though perhaps borrowed from an earlier owner. Oh, worshippers have been down here long before the Culdees came! There should be Mithraic emblems; but I suppose the first monks tossed those out, or obliterated them, and perhaps extirpated the Mithraists, too.”

Extensive carvings upon the walls could be made out dimly, as in the first cave, but no second catacomb of wall burials. “This place has been stripped by robbers or iconoclasts,” the Archvicar told them, “perhaps when the Templars were dispossessed, perhaps in 1500. No monstrance, no chalice, no ciborium, not one of the holy vessels to be seen; and no altar; and no body of Saint Nectan.”

“Nor any head, Nectan’s or anyone’s,” Coriolan said. “But the stone things remaining are marvelous. Do you suppose that Morton’s men sacked the Weem, after all?”

“No, for in their fury they’d have battered the carvings to shapelessness. These chambers have been denuded, so far as possible, but not desecrated. Probably the Third Laird meant to fit them up again, but wasn’t granted sufficient time. The cross, the pulpit, the baptismal pool, the saint’s coffin, the sacred carvings: these survive. With these, David Inchburn, Third Laird of Balgrummo, reputed warlock, really a papistical recusant, could have restored a catacomb worship. Given a trifle more time, he might have celebrated secretly the Council of Trent’s new Latin mass-to please his Bohemian beauty, like enough. Seeing all this, I think she must have been his Bohemian bride.”

Near one end of the sarcophagus, an irregular opening stood out in the torch beam, a greater blackness against blackness, almost a waiting mouth, inviting the reckless to enter. And close to the natural baptismal pool, Sweeney saw a third doorway. It was by this, he felt almost sure, that he had entered the cave in his vision.

Phlebas had crossed quietly to the mouthlike opening near the sarcophagus, and seemed about to venture inside. In a sibilant whisper, the Archvicar communicated some gibberish to him; and the little black man retreated to the Archvicar’s side.

“Don’t think of going into either of those black holes, just yet,” the Archvicar told Coriolan and Sweeney. “Up to this point, if we keep our wits about us, we’re safe enough: we have only to withdraw from this cave to the first cave, and then retreat out the passage to the vestibule, and after that through the tunnel to the monks’ drain, and last up the ladder-not, of course, that we’d be perfectly secure above stairs. Even were all of our lights to be extinguished here, we might contrive by thoughtful groping to come out of this Weem still hale of body and mind.

“But once a man passes through either of those two portals on the far side of this room, he’s in the labyrinth: I say this on the authority of Balgrummo’s scanty notes. Somewhere at the heart of that maze lies yet another chamber-with something inside it, I suspect-if one can contrive to creep all the way there. And beyond that center of the labyrinth may lie something more, something both symbolic and substantial.”

“You sound as if the thing went on for miles,” Sweeney groaned. He reached for a cigarette, but remembered that the Archvicar had forbidden him to smoke within the Weem.

“No, nothing like that, Sweeney, though I don’t know how extensive the labyrinth may be. Its enlargers had centuries to labor upon it, and the Scots have been good miners for a great while. It may not extend for more than a hundred rods in any direction; for that matter, it could be as little as a hundred yards in any direction. But the maze seems to be on several different levels, as if one were exploring a blacked-out tall hotel, and might forget what floor one had been on. The earlier part of the labyrinth is a subterranean watercourse, no doubt, whether dry now or still flowing. To this natural pattern, I gather from what I’ve read, the people who came down below to this underworld gradually added connecting and intersecting passages and blind alleys, also at different levels. Imagine yourself an ant inside a sponge, Sweeney: that image may give you some notion of our difficulty, once we enter either of those two openings on the other side of this chamber. It’s not so much a matter of length as it is of intricacy.”

“You’ll take another question?” Coriolan asked. “It’s this: why did men go down into these holes?”

Sweeney certainly didn’t relish prolonged abstract discussion deep within the Weem, however much it might suit Coriolan’s crazy fancy. Something might come at one out of those holes, any moment. Still, it was better standing here than pushing on into the labyrinth itself.

“Why, in search of transcendent power, in the beginning, I suppose: the power of the chthonian deities, or of the earth-mother. The early corners were after some mystery of faith, Coriolan.

“Then, in later centuries, came the Roman, or Romanized, votaries of Mithra, they too with their subterranean rites. There followed, perhaps after some considerable interval, the Celtic missionaries, or rather their converts. With them, or at least with the regular orders of monks that followed, this labyrinth was enlarged to become a symbolic representation of the coils of sin: a miner’s allegory of how, with Providence’s help, even a great sinner may find his way through the maze of unrighteousness to the salvation of the center; but also of how no man may attain that salvation except through God’s grace.

“I say ‘symbolic’ representation, Coriolan. But most people, in any age, confound the symbolic and the literal. Did such medieval pilgrims as may have been admitted to the interior portions of the Weem believe that they might be saved literally from the body of this death, by a mere physical progress to the heart of the labyrinth? Presumably some did think so; some did so act. Did any pilgrims win through, and win back again?”

Sweeney, half tipsy from the full cup of rum, felt about in the dark and gripped the Archvicar by the shoulder. “You think that this Weem, beyond this point, is a one-way street, and nobody’s ever come back?”

The Archvicar permitted Sweeney to clutch him, possibly sensing that Sweeney might have fallen otherwise. “Why,” he said, “I think that the last Balgrummo may have gone all the way to the center of the maze, and have come back. At any rate, he seems from his notes to have gone deep with the labyrinth, whether or not all the way to the center, and of course he returned.

“Yet there may be more to this labyrinth’s challenge than safe return to the point of entry. Some of the medieval pilgrims, or a few of them, seem to have aspired not merely to return to the Weem’s vestibule and reascend the Pilgrims’ Stair, but instead to attain the center of the labyrinth, and from there regain the outer world by some quite different route. This is hinted at in certain documents. This alternative route, a kind of literal
via negativa
—if ever it had any physical existence—seems to have been a mode of purgation. In the old documents, one encounters the suggestion that such a feat would have been accounted by the Church the moral equivalent of a pilgrimage all the way to Jerusalem; and by that
via negativa
feat, mortal sins would have been washed away-supposing the terrible underground pilgrimage of the Weem to have been undertaken by a humble and a contrite heart, in severe fasting and with ardent prayer, favored by grace.”

Coriolan had been listening in silence, his head close to the Archvicar’s. Now he said, quite loudly in the sepulchral cave, so that Sweeney jumped, “Why was the pilgrimage terrible?”

“Because,” the Archvicar answered, “the pilgrims had to pass through the symbols of devouring Time and merciless Death upon the way. I am not sure how those symbols were represented here, but they seem to have been dreadful.”

“Well, how many did pass through the clutch of Time and Death, to reach the world of life again?” Coriolan asked this gravely.

“I’ve found no record of any,” the Archvicar told him.

“Not Alec Balgrummo?”

“Not even the last Balgrummo.”

Coriolan stood silent. Then he said, “I must try.” He vanished from beside them; Sweeney’s torch beam caught him by the mouthlike doorway near the sarcophagus. Coriolan walked through that aperture, and at once the light from his lamp vanished; he must have rounded some turn of the passage beyond.

“Don’t do that, you damned fool!” Sweeney shouted after him, in real concern. At once the echoes took up the cry from many directions of this realm of night and of death and of devouring time: “... damned fool... damned fool... damned fool.”

“You haven’t the clues,” the Archvicar cried, in his command voice, with all the power of his lungs. “Turn back, Bain!”

“Back, Bain... back, Bain... back, Bain...” came the echoes, reverberating from beyond space, from beyond time. Coriolan did not call back.

And then Sweeney thought he heard something other than echo. Knock. Knock. Knock.

They had ceased to shout, and the echoes had ceased, and they stood shoulder to shoulder in that abysmal blackness, only Phlebas’ torch focused upon the passage mouth by which Coriolan had departed.

“Did you hear knocking somewhere?” Sweeney asked the Archvicar, trying not to panic.

“I think not. He took his pick with him, but nothing else.” Sweeney could not see the Archvicar’s face. The old man seemed to stand irresolute.

“Well, we’ve got to go after him, haven’t we?”

“Yes,” the Archvicar said, “so far as we dare. I have a pocket compass and a page of notes transcribed from Balgrummo’s journal; I don’t know what half the notes mean. Bring our things out of this chamber.” With the three picks, the torches, the rope, and the hamper, they crossed the cave and entered the passage beyond the sarcophagus. Here the floor sloped downward again, but only slightly. The passage, irregular and natural, was nearly as narrow as the monastic drain. After not more than six yards, it forked. The stony roof was low at this point, and the air seemed stagnant.

The Archvicar spoke to Phlebas, who set a match to one of the tallow torches, and held it high. It did not burn brightly in this atmosphere, or so Sweeney thought. The Archvicar produced a sheet of notepaper from a pocket, and examined it by the torchlight.

“We can’t leave him wandering about by himself in this crazy funhouse,” Sweeney declared with feeling. Concern for Coriolan had reduced Sweeney’s dread of the place. “Which way do we go now? Whatever got into Coriolan?”

“It must be to the right here,” the Archvicar responded, not altogether confidently, having consulted his compass. “Well, now for Ariadne’s thread.” He drew from his coat pocket a large ball of cord. “We’ll leave everything here but your pick and that coil of rope, Sweeney.”

Their scanty equipment they thrust as best they could into a crevice just around the corner of the next passage they were to follow. The Archvicar, Phlebas holding up the torch for him, wedged the two picks tightly into the crevice and tied to their crossed irons the end of his ball of cord.

“It’s conceivable,” the Archvicar was saying, “that Coriolan may make his way back up one or the other of these passages. If he turns one way, he’ll encounter our picks and torches-supposing his lamp still functions; if he turns the other way, he’ll find himself back in the second cave chamber, and so on an easy road back to the vestibule.”