Lord of the Hollow Dark (42 page)

Nobody had loved the disciples, and so little inquiry would be made after them on that account. Some of the disciples had possessed wealth, a most substantial inducement to the heirs to obtain positive evidence of their decease. But he had prevailed upon most of the disciples with money to transfer their assets to the Church of the Divine Mystery-his branch thereof-which he directed through subordinates under another alias; so that motive was much diminished. No, the police would not find him out.

On balance, then, this exercise at Balgrummo Lodging had gone well enough. On to grander successes! His own essence, pure spirit, was bent on destroying the world of flesh. Yet it was necessary to preserve carefully the envelope in which his spirit was encompassed-that envelope, that husk, so long passionately desired and sought, but so despised once possessed. A shabby garment for the grandeur of Kronos! Yet it must be cherished until mankind was undone.

He gloated again on that huge cartoon which was the inversion of the Agony. How masterfully represented, those instruments of torture fixed in the flesh of Mother and Child, those naked and contorted forms! Why, even the actual tormenting of Grishkin had not been so passion-rousing as this cartoon! He would like to take it with him when he departed, which might be awkward, still... He had thought of setting fire to Balgrummo Lodging at that departure, but he could not have waited to enjoy the holocaust without risk of bringing himself under observation; besides, access to the Weem might have been discovered among the ruins. One cannot enjoy every pleasure simultaneously—a principal fault of this flawed world of flesh which its idiot architect had committed at the Creation. He would have saved nothing but that cartoon from a conflagration; it is pleasant to see old things perish.

Now it was the hour for a sound solitary sleep, removed at last from Grishkin, after this week of arduous dissimulation and magic-working. He had been bruised badly by both Gerontion and his familiar Coriolan, for the first time physically assaulted in this body which must be preserved at all costs; but he had paid them out. He rose to leave the chapel.

Then, to his complete astonishment, Apollinax heard footfalls.

Someone had entered the desolate chapel. By the light of the guttering candles, Apollinax could not make out this visitant. Who could have passed through the pend, or out of the Weem? This coming was something preternatural. He was so astounded that he did not feel alarm.

At first, as the shape drew nearer, he thought it was Gerontion. Down he must go again! But the figure seemed to grow in height, bulk, vigor, expanding before his eyes. Now he saw the face distinctly.

This was Lord Balgrummo, the Weem’s Minotaur, returned to the ruined scene of his Trouble.

Apollinax was filled with exultation. However tardily, his summons had been obeyed! The thing had come at last to do him reverence.

He had experimented before in necromancy, but such successes as he had enjoyed had been evokings of flimsy, fluttering, mistlike shades, impotent, cringing, insubstantial. This revenant before him was solid and imposing, as material-seeming as Coriolan had been, but more awesome. This thing should serve him.

“Bridegroom, you come late to your Bride,” Apollinax began. “She has been entombed.”

The figure strode up quite close to him. Apollinax had expected the image of a man more than ninety years old, tottering, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” But this being looked immensely strong, virtue-filled. From some source, energy had poured into him. He was almost overwhelming in his presence. This was Balgrummo as he had been in his prime, at the time of his Trouble, “Ozyman-dias.”

The thing was dressed in black. It said nothing.

“You have kept me waiting, Balgrummo,” Apollinax told him. “Kneel before me, and adore me. I am Kronos, Lord of Time.”

The thing did not kneel.

“I am Master here,” Apollinax declared, with his little smile of mystical power. “Abase yourself!”

The specter regarded him sardonically. There came into Apollinax’s mind some recollection of a picture thief who had been found dead in this very room, with no wound on his body.

The revenant’s lips did not move, but a voice came to Apollinax’s consciousness-a voice speaking inwardly, with terrible assurance.

“There can be but one Master in Balgrummo Lodging,” it said. Then Apollinax noticed that in Balgrummo’s right hand, which hung by his side, was a kind of double-bitted ax, its hilt adorned with jewels.

“I am not of this world,” Apollinax said. “Bow down.”

“You are a man,” said Balgrummo.

“I have summoned you to serve me,” Apollinax insisted. “You come at my call.”

“I heard my son call to me,” said Balgrummo, through that inward voice.

Apollinax did not understand what he meant. “I am pure spirit acting through this envelope,” Apollinax told him. “The quick and the dead obey me. Hear this: just now I have imprisoned more than thirty human essences in a single agonizing moment of time, forever. Must I teach you obedience, you dead thing?”

“You are foul,” said Lord Balgrummo, through the voice which spoke to Apollinax’s mind only.

The figure lifted up the ax, the
labrys.
Balgrummo’s face was arrogant, eager, almost mindless. Apollinax’s eyes could not command this being.

Apollinax knew that he had turned livid. “Don’t,” he heard himself squealing, “don’t strike!”

“Blood shed in this house calls for more blood,” Balgrummo’s voice said.

The
labrys
came gleaming down. Apollinax heard himself screaming, begging, shrieking as Grishkin had shrieked. The pain wrapped about him like a shroud; the ax flashed up and returned again, chopping.

The mortal body, so long coveted, so despised when possessed, began to fall in pieces. And Apollinax, in his agony of dissolution, felt himself swept into the great gulf of Time. In his ears there rang the chuckle of the Lord of This World.

Sweeney’s pick broke through the seam, into some chamber beyond. He couldn’t have kept at the work much longer, his back aching almost insufferably. Beside him, little Brasidas had labored like a giant. “‘Back-breaking labor!’ You can say that again!” Yet Sweeney had been reluctant to take the rest breaks that Arcane had thrust upon him during this long struggle toward the upper world; after all, his own life depended upon those swinging picks.

It must be nearly noon outside. Would they ever make their way to the light? None of them could endure this confinement, let alone the fatigue.

Arcane’s invincible spirits had brought them so far as this: his humor in adversity, and his shrewdness at finding their way through the contrived corridors. If at last they were stopped by some overwhelming obstacle, Sweeney supposed that Arcane would accept death with a jest, self-mocking.

Arcane had brought them, weak and hungry though they were, through the cunning passages of the upper labyrinth, until they had arrived at the place where the whole way had been blocked by an explosion in 1578. There he had permitted them to rest, and to sleep if they might, a full three hours. Having roused them, he had nodded at the grim rubble-face revealed by his carbide lamp, sealing the old pilgrims’ way; “Beyond this, everything has collapsed for perhaps a hundred yards,” Arcane had told them. “I suspect that our Bohemian alchemist lies under the debris, hoist by his own petard. No one has walked that way since 1500, and probably few before that.”

Yet, as Arcane had predicted, they had found to their left a roughly-hewn passage through a coal seam into old, old mine workings. This was Balgrummo’s dangerous detour, excavated with immense labor over many years. Passing through the way Balgrummo had made, they had come into the entries, or miners’ tunnels, of the sixteenth century, it appeared. After many twists and turns, these half-choked entries had ended at a wall of coal. Through that coal barrier Sweeney and Brasidas had broken just now, after hours of fierce hacking.

“We’ve made it!” Sweeney shouted. Arcane hurried up from the dry space in the entry where he had been resting with the women. He would have been wielding a pick himself, Sweeney knew, if there had been room enough for him at the coal face; with surprising endurance, Arcane had spelled Sweeney and Brasidas earlier, and more than once.

Marina and Grizel Fergusson and Melchiora all were trembling with excitement. “But just where are we now?” Marina asked.

“High up the Den,” Arcane told them. “If Balgrummo’s calculations are so close as they have been so far, I know precisely where we stand. We’re about to make a hole big enough for us to crawl into the last portion of the upper labyrinth. After that, we should be only a few yards from daylight. Sweeney, you’ve earned your lieutenant’s commission in the Volunteers. Come back and sit down, you women, reserving what energies are left to you, and I’ll tell you how Balgrummo brought us this close to salvation.”

The docile Michael was being fed again, Marina veiling him with a fold of her torn and filthy wedding gown. All six of them were tattered and begrimed, but now strong in expectation.

“In 1780,” Arcane was saying, “the fifth Lord Balgrummo was informed that some of his miners near the top of the Den, taking coal from thick reopened seams that for some reason had not been thoroughly worked in earlier times, had broken by chance into an ancient passage. Though much experienced underground, these men were afraid to penetrate far into the twisting way they had discovered. Two of them swore that they had heard inexplicable knockings farther down. In those days, folktales of the Weem were told to every child, at an early age, in this parish.

“The fifth Lord Balgrummo, an old and infirm man, at once directed that the entry leading into the Weem be broken down and sealed. He is said to have muttered, on delivering his instructions to his steward, “... lest they emerge.” Ever since the succession of the Fourth Laird, in 1579, the Inchburn family had been wary of the Weem, forbidding discussion of it within Balgrummo Lodging. The prudential motives of the Fourth Laird no longer moved the Inchburns, of course: warlocks were not burnt in 1780, although witches still had been put to death in Scotland early in that century. Yet family custom had become immutable, or at least prescriptive. The entry was destroyed by gunpowder. This entry in which we sit is not that tunnel.

“But some time about 1920, I suppose, the last Lord Balgrummo, working his way through the chaos of neglected estate papers in the Muniment Room, happened upon a copy of his ancestor’s instructions to the colliers of 1780—and also found fairly detailed charts of the mine entries at the head of the Den and the brae beyond. He seems to have made careful computations as to whether it might be possible to force an opening from a different entry of the coal workings into the uppermost reach of the labyrinth. If the thing had been done by accident in 1780, might it not be done by design after 1920?

“At that time, he had not yet found his way into the Weem. But he perceived that if one could enter the caves under the Lodging, it might be possible for a pilgrim to emerge eventually at the long-sealed secret exit from the labyrinth, not far from the fall of the Fettinch Water at the den head.

“Also, having infinite enforced leisure, Balgrummo made repeated solitary investigations of the upper Den, then visited by no one else. He became almost certain of the spot where a privy stair, seldom trodden even before 1500, should terminate near the waterfall. This secret stair, incidentally, may have been hewn from the rock by the Templars, to provide a sally port from their house and the Weem, as well as having a symbolic importance connected with the Purgatory. Yet Balgrummo did not try to open the way to that stair from the outside.”

“Why not, in Heaven’s name?” Lady Fergusson inquired.

“In part, I suppose, because of his secretiveness: he could have been observed at outdoor operations. It’s true that presumably he would not have been prohibited by the police from excavating in his own policies; still, they might have suspected him of contriving an escape route, and he wanted no public meddling with the Weem.

“But mainly, I think, he did not take the easier course—it would have been far less trouble to work from above, instead of passing all the intricate and dangerous and laborious way through Weem and labyrinth, at first not even explored by him-because he knew that he must work out his own salvation with diligence. He must find the path through the hollow dark of the Weem and out again, as the Third Laird had tried in vain to do; because if he were to redeem himself, he must go the way the medieval pilgrims had gone, however hard it might be. This was his Purgatory, literal and symbolic. He would not cheat himself of possible redemption by taking shortcuts. I hope you know Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress.
Do you recall in Bunyan that little delusory hole in the hill, so close to the Celestial City, which actually was ‘the byway to hell,’ no satisfactory shortcut to Heaven? Well, Balgrummo was bent on making his true pilgrimage from beginning to end of the Weem and the labyrinth: therefore he wouldn’t try to enter from the back door First.

“I think that when first he came upon that frightening underground river which nearly stopped our own progress a few hours ago, he actually swam it, at frightful risk-because pilgrims were supposed to take their chances. Swimming, he passed under that wall of coal, nearly being drowned; but he found his way to the center of the Weem, by providence or luck, combined with his skill as a swimmer. He was a faithful hardy pilgrim, accepting lustration in Styx: that symbolic and literal passage to the heart of the labyrinth, through the underground river, did not daunt him, he knowing the symbolism of the washing away of sins, and also the symbolism of the passage through death to the life eternal. But was there ever so alarming a form of total immersion, so formidable a baptism, as that wild passage in the underground river of the Weem?

“Later, when he had to make many trips to the upper labyrinth, he managed to restore that medieval sluice shutter which, happily for us, can divert the flow of the underground burn into a lower level of the labyrinth. Thus he was able to bring in tools for his work in the upper labyrinth, and to avoid the risk of being drowned whenever he entered the heart of the labyrinth. Also, diverting the burn made it possible for him to bring in a helper, Jock Jamieson, who was supposed to be one of Lord Balgrummo’s keepers but actually was more like a retainer; at least I’m fairly sure that Jock helped him in the later stages of his work in the Weem.