Lord of the Hollow Dark (5 page)

After that, Mr. Apollinax had explained—so far as he might to a girl with no training in modern physics and metaphysics—about the Timeless Moment. Marina had not understood very well, but she had been filled with hope, and surely she would learn fully here at Balgrummo Lodging.

The deepest longing within all of us, Mr. Apollinax had told her, is to be liberated from the tyranny of time. Some of the ancients had discovered the key to that emancipation, but the secret had been lost with the triumph of the Church. Employing the methods of modern scientific investigation, in recent years Mr. Apollinax himself, with a few colleagues, had rediscovered that key. The gathering at Balgrummo Lodging was to realize for the first time, fully, that victory over time. In this consummation, Marina should share totally.

To escape out of time, Mr. Apollinax had said, one must be cast into ecstasy. The mind, in ecstasy, stands apart from the body; the spirit is liberated from the flesh. Marina had read something about that in the lives of the Christian mystics, she had told Mr. Apollinax.

“They wrote of possibilities; I speak of practices,” he had commented. For ecstasy to occur, he had continued, there is required an extraordinary object or action to contemplate, so that the functions of the senses may be suspended. Those conditions would be provided at Balgrummo Lodging, where circumstances were especially propitious for the divorce of consciousness from time.

Then Mr. Apollinax had gone on to talk of essences. So far as Marina had understood him, he had said that the
essence
of every human being transcends time, and that it has become possible-as it had been possible in early cultures, now crushed—to separate the human essence from human externals. The essence should be aware of itself in an eternal state, quite outside time, experiencing Timeless Moments. She thought he had spoken, among many other things, of “consciousness without substantiality.”

“Do you mean the soul?” she had inquired timidly.

Mr. Apollinax had smiled his peculiar little smile, indulgently. “Some use such language.”

It all had sounded as if this must be precisely what she had been seeking in the Church, but had not found there, because nearly all the nuns, and many of the priests of her acquaintance, had begun talking about how they were going to establish social justice right now. So few ever had mentioned the soul! But there had been Mr. Apollinax, with Mrs. Equitone watching him raptly, telling her of transcendence, and essences, and eternity! The Church had mentioned such realities when she had been a child.

“You’re telling me about the City of God!” she had exclaimed.

Then Mrs. Equitone had laughed. It had been a shrill, almost hysterical cackle, prolonged; and her face had gone all ugly and distorted as she had laughed. Marina had started and stared. Being extremely old, perhaps Mrs. Equitone had not had all her wits about her that day.

Mr. Apollinax had seized Mrs. Equitone by one wrist and looked into her eyes. She had sobered at once. “Quite, quite,” Mrs. Equitone had stammered, “of course, of course.” After that she had uttered no remark for the rest of the time she and Mr. Apollinax had spent in Marina’s flat.

Certain moments of consciousness, Mr. Apollinax had gone on to explain, are meant for eternity: states of ecstasy in which the human essence, stripped bare of all shame and sense of guilt, contemplates itself and other essences endlessly, changelessly. The essence transcends those impositions called “good” and “evil,” and rejoices forever in the one object or action that produces the ecstasy. That perfect divorce of consciousness or awareness from substantiality was to be achieved at Balgrummo Lodging, on Ash Wednesday next. Twelve were to enter into that ecstasy, and Marina would make the thirteenth.

Ash Wednesday! Marina had guessed all along that religious truths must lie behind all the metaphysical and scientific discourse of Mr. Apollinax. “So there’s more,” she had cried. “You’ve not told me everything yet!”

Mrs. Equitone had kept her lips pressed together, but she had glared at Marina with the strangest glint in her little old eyes. Mr. Apollinax had nodded solemnly.

“Yes, my dear young lady,” he had admitted, “there is more in store for you, more than you could imagine just now. You must participate to understand. We’ll do what we may to prepare you for the moment of truth of total revelation. I can say this: you will be transfigured.”

Marina almost had been transported, so to speak, then and there. “May I have my little Michael with me then? And really, will all my past life, everything I’ve done, be wiped away?”

“The baby shall be with you, and whatever you once were shall be effaced in the ecstasy,” Apollinax had promised her.

“I’ve never known what you call ‘ecstasy,’” she had babbled on, “unless”—here she had blushed—“unless I knew something like it, at first, with my baby’s father.”

“What you shall experience at Balgrummo Lodging shall be a thousand times more thrilling than that,” Apollinax had answered. He had seemed about to say more, when old Mrs. Equitone had been bent over double by a sudden fit of coughing, and it had been necessary to pound her on the back; she had turned quite purple in the face, and afterward had sunk back panting upon Marina’s shabby sofa.

Before Apollinax and the generous old lady had left, the details for Marina’s trip to Balgrummo Lodging—“a unique country place”—had been arranged. “But why have you chosen
me
, of all people?” Marina had asked at the last.

“Because we
need
you, Marina; remember to use that name. You’re precisely the one we need, very young, very pretty, very innocent, with a bouncing baby boy. You’ll see; our experiment probably would fail without you. It might be possible to dispense even with Mrs. Equitone”—here the old woman had gasped and tugged at Apollinax’s sleeve piteously—“but not with you. Do you know, there are no coincidences? That libelous piece about you in that foolish paper must have been meant to tell us where to find such a one as you. Some power has been at work.”

This had sounded so much like something that old Father Connery might have said! But Mr. Apollinax knew this scientifically, and poor Father Connery had known it only through a dogma. The whole episode had been perfectly dreamlike. Transfiguration promised, and a hundred pounds in Marina’s hungry purse to keep her snug until then! Mr. Apollinax and Mrs. Equitone had been angels, perfect angels.

“But you said that I was innocent, and I’m not actually, you know.” She had glanced at Michael’s cradle, and idiotically blushed scarlet.

“A young lady who can blush so utterly is innocent,” Mr. Apollinax had pronounced, and Mrs. Equitone had nodded her endorsement, nodding and nodding and nodding until Mr. Apollinax had touched her wrist again, at which she had jerked and ceased to nod. “We’ll have everything in readiness for you at Balgrummo Lodging. There will be an old clergyman, Archvicar Gerontion, at the house to officiate at your spiritual transformation, Marina.”

She had seen them into the street. A handsome black car, with a bushy-haired young driver at the wheel, had been waiting for Mr. Apollinax and Mrs. Equitone. She had waved to them as they were driven-off, and Mrs. Equitone had waved back, laughing and apparently calling out something, the whole length of the street.

The marvelous warmth of these recollections swept away Marina’s feeling of defenseless isolation at Balgrummo Lodging. She inspected her Michael, changed him, snuffed out the wick, and pulled the blankets up to her chin.

She had no notion of what hour it was when the faint singing woke her. It was much like plain chant. The distant sounds seemed to come from behind that little door near the chimney. She bounded out of bed and flung open that door to the stair: yes, the chanting came from somewhere far below. Barefoot, she skipped down the narrow twisting stone stair. The chanting could not be resisted.

Down she hurried, down and down, passing dim sealed doorways now and again, round upon round of the circling stair, descending through what must have been story after story of the house. Surely she was far below the ground level, below the cellars, when she burst into the passage at the stair’s foot.

It was a narrow subterranean alley carved from the rock. At the far end she could see a glow. She ran eagerly to that radiance, but somehow it took her a great while to reach the other end of the passage. She stood at last, transfixed, at the further opening, and before her yawned an underground hall.

Here the chanting was deafeningly loud, but wailing, rather than chanting. Many figures were prancing and strutting about the hall, each performing its own isolated dance, but keeping time to the chant or wail. All were naked, and their heads were not human.

Or were those masks covering the whole head, beast-masks, gargoyle-masks, insect-masks? The bare bodies were men’s and women’s. Fox-mask, weasel-mask, badger-mask, wasp-mask! They became aware of her, these creatures, of her poised there at the mouth of the cavern, as if about to leap in and join their celebration, flinging off her gown, donning some grotesque mask. Should she do just that? Should she consent to be one of them, unashamed? Every mask stared at her. Then one of the figures lifted its heavy mask, a sow-mask, and she saw the face of Mrs. Equitone.

All began to prance toward Marina, wailing and gesticulating, mowing and beckoning, Mrs. Equitone nearest to her. She tried to retreat, but a dread attraction held her. She tried to scream, but a yearning stilled her. It was even more horrid not to be able to scream than not to be able to move. Their arms reached out for her...

Now there came a wail behind her. She swung around, shrieking, and fell out of her bed. Her baby was crying.

All shaking, Marina snatched up the baby that had saved her from the nightmare. He must want to be fed, she realized. How long had he been sobbing? She opened her nightgown to nurse him—from instinct, almost, for she continued to quiver and gasp in terror of the vision. Had she been shrieking in her sleep?

Then someone tapped at a door.

In horror, staring at the small door beyond the fireplace, she screamed again. But the tapping did not come from that door. She faced round, the baby still at her breast, to the outer door of the room. Outside that door, someone was speaking softly, urgently, in a language she did not understand.

Then the chair she had propped under the doorknob began to move. Marina could not stir. The feeble barrier fell lightly to the floor, and the door opened, and someone slipped in.

Whatever light came through the windows was at Marina’s back. A woman’s voice was speaking to her, but she could not contrive to reply. Moving swiftly and deftly in the room’s blackness, the woman managed to light the gas jet. The flame dazzling Marina, she could not make out the intruder clearly for some seconds.

Then she saw a darkly lovely young woman, wild-looking, down her back a splendid mane of black hair, her face at once passionate and controlled, she bare-armed and bare of foot, in a loose black gown. Could this be one of the young people who served Mr. Apollinax?

The dark beauty was questioning her sharply, though keeping her voice low, in Spanish or Italian or Portuguese or some such language; Marina could not catch a single word of her meaning. Seeing that Marina did not understand, the young woman bit her full lip, paused, and then said, carefully, “Where?”

Marina pointed speechless to the little door beside the fireplace.

At that, the young woman pulled up her robe, snatched something from her thigh, and let the robe fall again. In her hand glittered a very long thin knife.

Clutching the baby, Marina fell back against the bed. The young woman leaped catlike past her and jerked open the little door.

There was nothing within but those cobwebs, so thick that they virtually sealed off both the descending stair and the ascending one. The young woman beckoned to Marina to join her. “
Chiuso
,” said the young woman, or some word like that.

Nothing could have passed up or down that stair for some years. The cobwebs and dust were inviolate.

An expression of amusement, not precisely a smile, came over the young woman’s face. She lifted her flimsy gown again and slid the slim knife back into a sheath strapped to her lovely thigh.

Marina groped for some Latinate word that would signify “nightmare”; one came that might suffice. “
Fantasma
,” she said. Was that right? She gestured with both hands to her eyes and forehead. “
Fantasma
!”

“Si,
si
,” the young woman responded, actually smiling now. Like some magnificent cat, she glided back to the door of the room. “
Buona notte
!” She closed the outer door behind her, and was gone.

Marina glanced at her watch. It was a quarter past three. Michael, who had been sucking lustily all the while, had lapsed into sleep. Marina took him into the bed with her, and knew nothing more.

Having turned the key in the oldfangled, ineffectual lock on his door, Sweeney hurriedly looked into his suitcase. It was empty.

He wrenched open drawers of an old chest. There lay most of his things, laid out by someone. His suits hung in an armoire. But what he wanted most was nowhere: no whiskey, no marijuana, no pistol. He searched the room frantically, even throwing off the sheets from the bed. No, they had been taken away: the three bottles, the paper of pot, the revolver and the box of cartridges. Drink, drugs, and weapons, Apollinax had said, must not be brought to Balgrummo Lodging, and those crazy young acolytes of his must be enforcing the rule.

It would have been pointless to appeal to Apollinax. If he tried that, he might lose his job; and it was conceivable that Apollinax might tell the punks to knock him about, by way of discipline. He must grin and bear it.

Sweeney could understand forbidding the others in this house to bring such stuff with them: they were a lunatic lot who might do anything on impulse. But why impose the rules upon him-upon Sweeney, efficient and tough? “Apeneck!” He had worked for Apollinax, well paid, for a year and a half, although seeing the Master seldom. Hadn’t he delivered the goods? Those trips to Haggat had been really risky. But here he was left with a mighty unquenchable thirst, an ungratified craving for relief from tension by pot, and no means of defense.