by Russell Kirk
There was no signature. But scribbled hastily at the bottom of this page was a note:
Sweeney, despite all this, he is going forward with everything projected. You have your work to do for him, and I have mine. You are not permitted to leave the policies. There is a chart of the Priory drains, and he knows that I possess it; you will have to try.
There was one more sheet of notepaper. At its head was written, “The Final Chorus from ‘Fragment of an Agon.’” There followed some lines of verse. What was this about waking “in a sweat and a hell of a fright,” and the hangman waiting, and “perhaps you’re dead,” and “hoo ha ha”? Then a notation from the Archvicar, “This occurred to the original Sweeney. Guard the horned gates.”
Sweeney swore, crumpled up the last sheet of paper, and flung it into the grate. Salary or no salary, he would leave these kooks tomorrow. But now he had to get a few hours’ sleep. He kept the light on.
Sweeney had set out to find Marina’s room, but somewhere he had taken a wrong turning. There were no doors at all in this passage, and no windows. It grew narrower and narrower, so that his shoulders brushed the stone walls on either side; it seemed to have no end. These walls were clammy with something-could it be moss?-and he shivered in his pajamas. And perhaps you’re alive and perhaps you’re dead. Hoo ha ha. Hoo ha ha.
At last he emerged into a broad space. It was no house at all. It was a cave! His right foot splashed into a rock pool, with a small stalagmite rising from the edge of it. Hoo, hoo, hoo.
Then the knocking began. They were coming, the file of them, a torchbearer at their head. Where might he hide? There was an irregular recess, like the interior of an ear, beyond the little pool, and he shrank into it. Knock knock knock.
As they came on, so slowly, those with pickaxes and mattocks knocked upon the walls, knock knock knock. The file entered the cave. Like him, they were lost.
Behind the torchbearer limped a red-bearded man. His head was splendid, and he had a powerful torso with a breastplate upon it. But he was so bandy-legged as to be almost a dwarf. One arm, a bloodstained bandage wrapped round it, hung useless at his side.
Two wild-eyed men, barefoot and nearly naked, came behind him, bearing a sort of litter. On it lay a waxen-faced woman, her hair falling over the edge of the litter, her eyelids closed.
The rest followed, not many, perhaps nine or ten, some armed with swords or pikes, two or three with morions on their heads, one with an immense heavy gun slung over his shoulder. Others, looking like savages, had only the picks. Every one of them seemed wounded. Knock knock knock.
At a gesture from the red-bearded man, the litter was set down gently, and the men went on their knees to drink from the little cave pool. Red Beard brought the water in a morion to the woman, but her lips could not be parted. They stood round the litter in a hopeless circle. Now their mouths were moving, yet Sweeney could hear no sound. How could they not see him, so close to hand?
Presently the litter was lifted up again, and the file turned into the passage by which Sweeney had come. As they vanished down it, the picks and mattocks began knocking again. Knock. Knock. Knock. There came a pause; then a volley of furious pick-strokes; he could imagine the flying stone chips.
Then another pause; after that, the monotonous knocking, fainter as the file progressed. Knock. Knock. Knock.
Sweeney crept out of the recess. Hoo ha ha, hoo ha ha. His ankle turned on a stalagmite, and he fell into the dark pool. It was not shallow, for he sank and sank and sank, his lungs filling. Hoo ha ha!
He woke in a sweat and a hell of a fright. “You’ve had a cream of a nightmare dream and you’ve got the hoo-ha’s coming to you.” Through and through his head the line ran. The gaslight showed him his long narrow bedroom, and he was back from the worst bad trip, and he was alone in the middle of the night.
5
Revelations in the Den
How pretty the monkey puzzle was, with snowflakes clinging to it! There had been a very light snowfall during the night, and the morning was clear and cold. From her bedroom window, Marina had a fine view of a pond only a few hundred yards distant from the house, and beyond that the mouth of the half-wild Balgrummo Den, with the Fettinch Water from the gray hills splashing down through its boulders. Tremendous larches grew in the Den, and she could see that the jungle of rhododendrons nearly choked the paths. The walls of this little valley were precipitous. What privacy Balgrummo Lodging had! Marina yearned for a long walk with her baby.
Phlebas had brought her tea and toast and porridge. Now it was nearly nine o’clock, and last night’s dream seemed absurd, though she must ask Mr. Apollinax if it held any mystical significance. Could Mr. Apollinax possibly find time enough to talk with her, despite all those people crowding about him?
Someone knocked. It was Madame Sesostris, looking not quite so decrepit this morning, and she said, “Time for a constitutional, my dear.”
“Oh!” Marina started. For behind Madame Sesostris was that dark young woman who almost might have been part of her dream-Marina not having been quite sure that her rescuer hadn’t been insubstantial too. Yet here the girl was, although changed; she nodded gravely to Marina. This morning the young woman had on a coarse black dress that covered her arms and came down almost to her ankles. She wore ugly shapeless shoes. Her long hair was tied with a plain black bow, and her eyes were downcast. “Buon giorno, signora.”
“I understand,” Madame Sesostris was saying, “that you’ve met our maid, Fresca, our Sicilian jewel. She has the room next to yours-or next once removed, rather-and she has sharp ears. She’d not have burst into your room as she did if she’d not thought something might have happened to your baby in the night, when you cried out so long and loud. This is a dreamy house, isn’t it? Some peculiar dreams came to myself last night, and even to the Archvicar. But do come and clear away the cobwebs with a stroll up the Den.”
Fresca following with the baby in her arms, they made their way through two corridors and down that short flight of stairs. The Archvicar was waiting for them at the foot, in the long gallery through which Marina had passed last night.
He brought his heels together and bowed. Despite his clerical collar and black garments, there was something faintly military about the Archvicar, and about his servant Phlebas, too. “You look so smart this morning!” the Archvicar greeted her. “I trust you had a good rest.”
“No,” Marina told him, “I’m sorry, but actually I dreamed almost all night long.”
“Did you now? So did I-horrid episodes. Ordinarily other people’s dreams bore me”—the Archvicar simulated somnolence—“but do you know, I should like to hear about yours before we stroll. There’s a little ancient parlor just along this gallery; it may have been the old priors’ solar. It has the advantage that no one could get at your back unexpectedly there. Shall we sit there in the sunlight for a few minutes? Along the way, I can show you some of the better pictures in the Lodging. The first Lord Balgrummo-that Scots peerage was a Charles II creation-made this gallery, they say, by throwing together some rooms surviving from the Priory.” They commenced their slow way along the gallery. “I was told that Mr. Apollinax expects to talk with you tomorrow morning, Marina,” Madame Sesostris remarked. “He’s meeting with the twelve disciples just now.”
“Oh, should I be with them?” Marina was alarmed: she might be missing some elucidation of the doctrine of the Timeless Moment.
“No,” the Archvicar assured her, “the Master has told me that he intends something different for you.”
Marina wished that she might see the Archvicar’s eyes behind those strange spectacles of his. “I’d like to ask Mr. Apollinax about my dream.”
“Perhaps I would be interested in what he might have to say,” the Archvicar told her. “Might the dream be a transference from his fancy to yours? But you’re not quite ready for such discussions. Now do look at those pictures on the walls here. That’s a Romney, rather a fine one, that portrait of the hard-eyed old
gentleman: General Sir Angus Inch-burn, in India with Hastings. And over there, I believe-my poor eyes can’t be trusted-yes, it’s the Holbein the second Lord Balgrummo acquired. Now on the left, notice that little Cranach, with the grotesques and the flames: the last Lord Balgrummo particularly relished that, even if his father had given too much for it.”
They had arrived at the priors’ solar, with its Gothic window tracery. “What a cheerful sunny room!” Marina exclaimed. “And the picture on the opposite wall-who is that?” It was an antique painting of a man in the prime of life, with a handsome head and a red beard. He was seated, and the legs looked curiously foreshortened. A sword lay on a table beside him.
“You’ve picked out the oldest painting in the house,” the Archvicar said. “The artist is unknown, although probably a German painter, and presumably this was done in the Ger-manys. The man in the picture is David Inchburn, Third Laird of Balgrummo, called the Warlock, who died somewhere under this house. It’s been heavily restored, I suspect, having been damaged in the sack of the Lodging in 1578. It passed then into the possession of the earls of Morton, but the ninth Lord Balgrummo bought it back. He grumbled about being compelled to pay a thumping price for property stolen from his own house. All the same, he could well afford the price, for in his day the Balgrummo Pits were one of the most profitable coal mines in Scotland.”
“That German painter was good at faces but not at figures,” Marina commented, pointing to the awkward legs of the Third Laird.
“Blame God, not the German.” The Archvicar motioned to the others to be seated, and took a chair himself. “He was called ‘Dwarfie’-although not in his presence, you may be sure. All the same, he was a great mercenary captain, and a centaur when mounted.”
A curious feature of the painting was a separate small portrait of a lovely woman, in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas, looking as if it had been painted in later. She was standing, and her hand rested upon a book. “Could that be his daughter?” Marina inquired.
“Her name was Anna. She died with the Third Laird, or before him, in the fight with Morton’s men. The Earl of Morton had denounced her as a succubus, but I’m inclined to think that she was merely a Bohemian. David Inchburn had brought her back with him from his wars in the Continent—and her father, too, a learned alchemist. Whether or not he was married to her in the Germanys is uncertain; he might have been, for he had been a widower for some years. The Fourth Laird was a child of the early marriage. Anna came to a hard land and died a hard death, poor creature.” Marina moved closer to the picture. “I’ve seen someone with a face like his-not long ago, I think.” Then—“Oh!” She wheeled around. “Archvicar, he looks just like you!”
The Archvicar seemed taken aback. “My dear,” Madame Sesostris put in, “I suppose there are certain types of faces which turn up everywhere. Besides, the man in the picture has red hair and a fair skin, and of course the Archvicar is quite different.”
“But look at the nose, and the forehead, and the lips, and the cheekbones, and the ears, and everything!” Marina pointed out.
“Marina, you flatter me,” the Archvicar smiled. “Do tell us about that dream of yours.”
Why didn’t they see the perfect resemblance? She did wish she might pull off the Archvicar’s spectacles, to find if his eyes were like the Third Laird’s, but she didn’t dare ask that.
“Do sit down in the sun, my dear,” Madame Sesostris commanded, indicating a window seat. “Was your baby in the dream?”
Marina related everything: every detail of the vision had stuck with her, something rare in Marina’s dreaming. She shivered a little as she came to the moment in which she had hesitated at the mouth of the subterranean hall, half longing to join those strange horrid dancers. “What did it mean, Madame Sesostris? Can you tell me?”
The old woman clasped her hands together so that her gnarled knuckles showed white. She glanced at the old man. “It means, Marina dear, that you should cherish the Archvicar-supposing that hell consent to be cherished.”
“Ah, well,” Archvicar Gerontion sighed, “merely one more hostage... You saw Mrs. Equitone among those dream-figures. Did you seem to recognize anyone else-any man, say?”
“Mrs. Equitone was the only one who took off her mask.” Marina tried to laugh. “I suppose it’s all so silly! Of course Mrs. Equitone would be the last person to prance about with nothing but a mask on.”
“Would she?” The Archvicar played with his stick. “I’m happy that it wasn’t my dream-not if Mrs. Equitone was leading the revels. Now if it had been that Grishkin...”
“Archvicar!” Madame protested.
“I’m a pig in the sty of Epicurus,” the Archvicar confessed. “Eh, Fresca?” As if summoned, there rose up the Sicilian girl, Marina’s baby huddled asleep in her arms.
“She scarcely knows English from Mandarin,” Madame Sesostris told Marina, nodding toward Fresca. “Now shall we go into the Den? We oughtn’t to miss this rare sunshine.”
As they left the parlor, Marina glanced once more at the painting. How like! She offered to carry her baby; but Fresca, with Madame Sesostris for interpreter, declared that she had not held him long enough; so Marina laughed and submitted. At a snail’s pace, the Archvicar led them down stairs and through complex narrow corridors until they emerged from beneath an ogival arch into the policies. There were stables, and beyond them the luxuriance of the Den. What grand trees, what a wilderness of weeds and neglected shrubbery surrounding the pond at the foot of the Den!
They made their way past the stables. On a whinstone boulder sat one of those shock-headed young men who were Mr. Apollinax’s “neophytes” or “acolytes.” The boy-he could not have been more than eighteen-looked Marina up and down, with a slight grin on his lips, saying nothing.
“Good morning,” the Archvicar greeted him.
The boy did not respond, looking at Marina still, not at the rest of them.
Hobbling up close to the acolyte, the Archvicar said, distinctly and civilly, “A fine day, isn’t it, though chill?”
The boy ignored him, smirking at the ground.
“Stand up, boy!” said Archvicar Gerontion. His voice had become crisp, cutting, not to be denied. Marina wondered whether Red Beard in the painting had possessed a voice like that. The new voice was so pitiless that she trembled herself.
The young man sprang up as if he had been stabbed. “Hi,” he said, uncertainly.
“Young men better than you have been fed to dogs, in lands where I have lived,” the Archvicar remarked. “Now sit!” Gaping, Shock-head sank down again.
The Archvicar limped on, his little party following. “Those chaps and the four girls are a dazed lot.” It was his old soft voice again. “Do you suppose they talk with one another?”
They were crossing a high-arched little bridge; beneath them foamed the Fettinch Water, almost in spate from the night’s snowfall, which must have been heavier up in the mysterious hills from which the Fettinch Water came. Below the bridge, some of the burn’s water was diverted into a lade, a side channel. “That led to the old monks’ mill,” the Archvicar told them, pointing to the lade. How attentive and agreeable this old man was, except when he used that other voice of his! They labored higher up the Den, forcing their way along forgotten paths, until they arrived at two marble benches which faced toward the Lodging. Michael was awake now, but cheerful, being well bundled up.
“Take pity on an old man’s decrepitude, and sit with me here,” the Archvicar pleaded. Resting, they enjoyed a good view of the back of Balgrummo Lodging. Marina could see now that the Lodging stood upon a broad mound, doubtless steeper at the front of the house than at the back where it met the Den. To either side of them, the jagged cliffs of the Den rose up sharply. Marina could descry that the high stone dyke at the entrance to the policies stretched back, in very long graceful curves, until the walls joined with the cliffs at the mouth of the Den. It was impossible to get into the Den, or out of it, unless one passed
through the pend at the front of the Lodging-unless, of course, men used ladders against the dyke; but they would have had to be very tall ladders. Still farther distant, beyond the dyke, lay the broad sinister green surface of the Fettinch Moss, and beyond that, clumps of trees. They might have been in another century, another world.
It was like being in a long quarry, Marina thought, with those sheer walls of the Den enclosing them. She looked toward the head of the Den: the Fettinch Water poured over the cliff there in a high delightful cataract, with no sign of a path leading upward. Gardeners had not pruned or planted in these policies for a long while, but the spot was lovely despite that. Her father the General had found it necessary to sell their family’s country place in Lincolnshire not long after she had been born, so that she had known only London well. She might loll here forever, listening to this strange insinuating old clergyman, quite content.
“How does one get to the top of those cliffs?” she asked, languidly.
“One doesn’t. The Den is steep and narrow naturally, and made steeper by art. They quarried here the stones for the fencible house of the Templars that stood below, and after that they quarried more stones when those buildings were enlarged into the fourteenth-century Priory of Saint Nectan, and then later the lairds of Balgrummo took still more stone from the Den to build or rebuild the Lodging that still stands. Despite this steepening by the quarrymen, some of the Earl of Morton’s infantry came down this way to storm the Lodging in 1578. So the Fourth Laird, not long after 1600, had his people skillfully cut away rock, making the Den walls quite sheer, that his enemies shouldn’t get at his back as they had got at his father’s. There’s no way in and no way out, except for the great pend at the entrance to the Lodging.”
“I’m afraid I know very little Scottish history,” Marina told him, “though I wish I did. This whole place seems so old, old, old!”
Squirming himself into a more tolerable posture on the marble seat, the Archvicar nodded amicably. “Something must have been on this site before Saint Ninian began to baptize in Scotland; perhaps something was here before Jesus of Nazareth was born. The tumulus or great mound where the Lodging stands is artificial in part, older than even the Picts; it’s no mere medieval mote-hill. And the oldest thing is under this site. One of the surprising features of your nightmare, Marina, is that some sort of cave or hall, with Lord knows what cunning passages and dark depths, does lie under the Lodging. You didn’t know that, not at all?”