Lord of the Hollow Dark (33 page)

Madame Sesostris had spread out her fantastic deck of cards upon a desk. “No, child, he couldn’t have concealed so big a weapon on his body, and he says we contend against dominations and powers, and that we mustn’t draw the first blood in this haunted house, if blood’s to be drawn.”

The old lady was selecting some cards from her pack, rejecting others. “Here’s Saturno, or Kronos: that’s Apollinax. Here’s Misero, Misery: let him be Sweeney. Take Fameio, the faithful servant, for Phlebas. Then Chavalier, or Knight: who better for our Manfred? Beside him, Forteza, or Strength, toppling her pillar, a lion by her feet: that’s your very self, Fresca. I take Astrologia for myself, in my present role. For Coriolan? I am not sure of him; but let us represent him by Chronico, the Genius of Time, winged. Clearly, my dear Marina, you are Charita, unselfish love.”

“But my baby?” Marina bent bewildered over the cards.

“I have no card of an infant in isolation. But I know: little Michael shall be the cosmic principle of Speranza, Hope, always next to Charita; here the card is.”

They might as well play at little trifling games, Marina thought, for nothing else could be done now. “Will you find cards for Grishkin, and all the disciples, and all the acolytes?”

“No, my dear: those are faceless cyphers, impotent, lost. But I do seek one more card, Marina. Prima Causa? No, that would be presumptuous, blasphemous. Let it be rather the Re, this king, scepter in hand, that ‘sneer of cold command’ upon his hard face. Call him Ozymandias; call him King of Terrors.”

“But who is he, in this house?”

“Why, Marina, he’s Alexander Fillan Inchburn, last Lord Balgrummo.”

Marina looked at her with a chill wonder. “A dead man?”

“A spirit in prison.” Madame Sesostris arranged her chosen cards in a circle. “These are the wanderers in this labyrinth of ours.”

In her pose of astrologer-clairvoyant, the old lady seemed as eerie as any of Apollinax’s crew. Retreating from the cards, Marina sat down by Fresca; slashing though the Sicilian was-Marina had learned about the lesson she had taught Sweeney-she remained passionately human enough.

This was Wednesday-Ash Wednesday. Only last Friday, at this hour, Marina had been in London, suffused with joy in anticipation of the Timeless Moment that she was to know. Here at Balgrummo Lodging, five days later, she was a prisoner awaiting some vague indescribable horror, of which the dead lady’s yellowed wedding gown would be part-and she was idling away with occult cards what few hours remained before the catastrophe. She went back to the barred window.

But she could see nothing from that window-not a shrub, not a tree! A few minutes earlier, from this same window, she had looked at the decayed great oaks and limes and beeches of the forepark. But now, this February morning, such a fog as she never had known before, not even in the foggiest seasons of London, had hung itself about Balgrummo Lodging. Something that she had read recently came upon her, abruptly, madly: “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes...” Yes, right up to those window-panes, the dense mist enshrouded everything, aspiring to thrust its muzzle into the Muniment Room. “Enshrouded”—precisely the right word. This was not night, neither was it day. She gave a low cry of astonishment and dread.

“What is it?” Fresca joined her at that obscured window. “
Ognisanti!
” Hearing these exclamations, Madame Sesostris hurried spryly over, no longer pretending to be the tottering death’s head.

Madame Sesostris drew in her breath. “Oh! I’d not expected
that.
We seem to be quite out of space, out of time. I wish that His Excellency would come. Well, there’ll be no rescue from outside. Even were anyone from the outside world to look for the Lodging just now, he might find nothing at all.”

“Is that fog-why, is it
real
?” Marina clutched the old lady’s wrist.

Madame Sesostris looked at her for some moments before replying. “In this house, Marina, with Apollinax at his conjuring,” she said then, “I think that ordinary reality may be suspended: I don’t know a better way to express what I mean. This is Ash Wednesday, but here it might be Ash Wednesday in any year, or an Ash Wednesday somehow independent of chronology, don’t you know. Apollinax may have kept out the living world and have summoned the dead; I sense presences... We can call it illusion, if we like; but we exist just now as part and parcel of that illusion, and may perish, physically die, in that illusion conjured up by Apollinax. Our little play will be played out quite apart from whatever may occur today in Edinburgh or London; quite independent of time as time is reckoned ordinarily, almost divorced from the ordinary operations of what we call the laws of nature. One might say that we’re imprisoned within a dream, and that Apollinax is the dreamer.”

She ran a wrinkled hand across her old forehead. “We’ll find this night whether Apollinax is wholly master of his own dream. The Archvicar says that Apollinax has acquired powers like those which Simon Magus had in Saint Paul’s time—or rather, Apollinax has summoned up those powers for which a price has to be paid. Do come away from these dreadful windows.”

Why, thought Marina, I’m back in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense again: it’s the Red King’s Dream, and I’m Alice. But no one hurt Alice, actually, even though the Queen did cry, “Off with her head!” How crazy, to go maundering about Alice in this desperate plight! But perhaps it was only comic nonsense that could keep anyone sane in Balgrummo Lodging.

The Muniment Room was not uncomfortable: among other amenities, it was one of the few rooms in the Lodging to have a gas fire installed in its fireplace. The three of them huddled about that blue-green fire. Sitting there silent, Marina could hear, very faintly, the sound of that chanting—clamorous, eager-in another part of the Lodging. She could see with her vivid mind’s eye the faces of Mrs. Equitone, Eugenides, Madame de Tornquist, de Bailhache, Fraulein von Kulp, Hakagawa, Princess Volupine, Channing-Cheetah, and all the rest, disciples and acolytes, hideously rapt, led by Apollinax with his unfinished face, chanting in frenzy, calling upon the Prince of This World.

“Oh, I’ve been such a fool,” she sobbed before the other two prisoners, “such a fool to imagine that I could enter into some Timeless Moment!”

Madame Sesostris’ hand was laid upon hers. “Not a fool to imagine the possibility, Marina: merely a trifle foolish to fancy some Simon Magus could give you that. For a timeless moment, my child, ordinarily comes upon you when you’re unaware and unexpectant; and it comes from faith, from hope, from charity; from having done your work in the world; from the happiness of people you love; or simply as a gift of grace. It can’t be cobbled up by some magician or ordained by some statist.”

“It may come at the moment of death, but endure forever,” said Fresca.

“The Timeless Moment is ‘the still point of the turning world,’” the old lady went on, “a moment that is only incidentally Now: it’s a contact with the Eternal and the Other. It may come to us when we are out hill-walking, say, alone, and look down upon fields and woods and a lovely village and the sea beyond-when we know that prospect will be with us forever, and we with it forever. It may come after much prayer and contemplation. It may come in a flash, illuminating, we knowing in the precious moment that we endure beyond time and place and circumstance. It may come to a soldier when he sacrifices himself. It may come to us, bringing peace in the midst of passion, in the sexual union that is blessed. One word we use to describe this experience of timelessness is ‘ecstasy.’”

“Ecstasy!” Marina shuddered all over her body. “I think that’s what Apollinax is going to push us into tonight-the ecstasy of the animals! Oh, I told you my dream, and you wouldn’t interpret it-it seems so long ago when I told you, up the Den. Is that Apollinax’s Timeless Moment-dancing forever, with animal faces, naked, shameless, down underground, turning into beasts, doing horrible things, on and on, round and round, forever and ever, chanting, screaming, no way out, no past, no future, loving it, loathing it, turning into something not human? Oh, it would be like Hell!” Fresca had produced a rosary from the bosom of her frock, and was muttering energetically, telling her beads, with great swiftness running through prayers in Italian.

“That seems to be part of what Apollinax intends,” the old lady said hoarsely, “or so the Archvicar thinks. The ‘liturgy,’ the ‘Ceremony of Innocence,’ has been patched together by Apollinax from fragments of Gnostic rituals—from the Cainites, the Sethites, of nineteen centuries ago. And the Archvicar says that Apollinax has mingled a good deal of Mithraic ritual with this, too, because there may have been a Mithraic temple in the Weem once. And part of the ceremony, the worst part, is Apollinax’s own inspiration. The Archvicar only guesses at the very worst, and Grishkin and the disciples and the acolytes don’t know all-they might run, if they did.

“Apollinax intends something more terrible than that ‘ecstasy of the animals’ dance you saw in your vision. The ceremony would not be
like
Hell; it would
be
Hell. And the disciples and the acolytes desire it passionately, what they know of it. The Archvicar says that no one is damned against his will, but many pursue their own damnation. And in all of us there lurks some yearning for damnation, some unholy appetite for a Timeless Moment of complete degradation, smelling ‘corruption in the dish, incense in the latrine, the sewer in the incense,’ ‘descending to the horror of the ape,’ some hankering after a Now of shame which will endure forever. Apollinax offers that, and he has many takers.”

“Apollinax may kill us, but he can’t damn us,” Fresca burst out. “He’s only a man.”

“He can corrupt, but he cannot damn,” Madame told them. “If we don’t consent, he can destroy nothing but our bodies—though he may think that he’s master of Time, or that he’s Time himself, Time the Devourer. But is Apollinax a man only? He thinks that something Other has entered into him; the Archvicar says that indeed ‘possession’ occurs, though rarely, and that an Other may have taken possession of the man called Apollinax, with that man’s eager consent. Apollinax sought, and found, and was given his heart’s desire. Once I knew a possessed man who lived in Cheyne Walk. Why not one in this memory-soaked house?”

She shuffled her strange cards, the chosen cards, absently. “There’s more than one sort of dream, and there’s more than one sort of ecstasy. There is the high dream, from between the gates of horn, the vision of the transcendent. There is the low dream, from between the gates of ivory, the vision of fallen man. Also there is the ecstasy of salvation, the moment beyond moments in which one rises out of here and now to an eternity of love and beauty; and the ecstasy of damnation, the moment beyond moments in which one sinks beneath here and now to an eternity of hatred and horror.

“With all his powers, Apollinax has dreamed the low dream, the lowest of all dreams, the vilest of visions; and tonight, with all his powers, Apollinax means to cast us into that ecstasy of damnation, that ecstasy of beasts and of worse than beasts. And of that ecstasy, he means, there shall be no end. Except for Apollinax himself, the Archvicar says, no one is meant to leave this house alive; but in the ecstasy of the damned, every spirit shall dwell in this house forever, in this house of the Lord of This World.”

She had spoken like a sibyl, like a Norn, this pretended cartomancer, this old Englishwoman withered by the African sun.

Marina was slipping from her chair; she knew it, but was powerless; Fresca caught her in her arms. Madame Sesostris rummaged frantically through her purse: “My salts of ammonia! Ah, here we are!” She thrust the little golden filigree bottle under Marina’s nose. “Oh, Marina, there was no other way than to tell you my hard truths. There’s so little time left to us, and you must be strong against the ecstasy, proof against the horror and against the terrible pain if it comes, and not consent at all, even in the agony...”

“Here they come!” Fresca hissed. The heavy door of the Muniment Room had opened, and Grishkin entered, and others behind her.

But this was no last summons. It was the Archvicar and Sweeney and Phlebas whom Grishkin had brought. Behind them, in the doorway, Marina could see three armed acolytes, two of them grinning, one scowling. The scowling one had a swollen eye.

Grishkin had brought three more robes-two of them scarlet, but a black one for the Archvicar. “We’ll come for you at ten o’clock,” she said. “All of you must be robed then. We shall proceed first to the chapel, then to the Weem. The Bride”—she looked at Marina—“must be gowned by the time we come for all of you.” With her dancer’s step, she turned to go.

But the Archvicar laid a hand upon her arm. “Grishkin,” he said, earnestly-not in the chaffing tone he used so often—“Grishkin, Simon Magus had such a one as you: she was called Helena, and Simon said that she was the First Conception of his own divine mind, the mother of all things on earth. But truly Helena was a whore whom he had purchased in Tyre.

“Now I know your true name: it’s Carmella di Stefano, and I was acquainted with you slightly in Rome, and better in Haggat, though not carnally. I’d have spoken to you of this earlier; but there was no good opportunity, and it would have been dangerous for me. This moment is our last time for talk.”

She was looking at him blankly.

“Don’t you remember me from Haggat, under another name-not at all? Listen to me: I am risking everything by telling you this.”

Marina had risen, and was standing close to Grishkin. Into Grishkin’s hard contemptuous stare there seemed to come, if for a second, some bewildered recollection; her lips parted, but she said nothing; she and the Archvicar were staring into each other’s eyes. The Archvicar removed his goggles, so changing his whole appearance.

“Send those acolytes away,” the Archvicar whispered to her. “You’re in peril, Carmella. Apollinax won’t spare you; though I don’t sleep with him, I know more than you do about what he intends. I’ll give one more hostage to Fortune; I can save you, or try to, if you’ll permit me. You’re no more Grishkin than Helena was the First Conception. Come out from under the
kalanzi!
Close that door, and stay here with us for five minutes, and I’ll tell you...”