Lord of the Hollow Dark

by Russell Kirk

  He jangled the little silver bell again. People began to rise and make their way out of the dining room. Several stared at Marina rudely, but no one spoke to her-not even Eugenides, intimidated by a glance from the Archvicar. She found herself proceeding down a corridor in company with Madame Sesostris; the Archvicar had lingered behind, perhaps for instructions from Apollinax.

  “What, my dear, do you make of all that?” the old lady was asking.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t follow him as intelligently as I should have done, except when he spoke of our Lord,” Marina ventured. “Then he sounded like one or two priests I’ve known, but more impressive than they ever were.”

  “By that title, I suspect,” said Madame Sesostris, “Mr. Apollinax signified the Lord of This World.”

  “What do you mean?” Wasn’t Christ the lord of this world? The old lady smiled her toothy crocodile smile, her sunburnt face condescending.

  “You Romans, my dear, never read Luther—or the Manichees, either. Kingdoms of the earth, you know, and Bright Star of Morning, and all that. At least Apollinax admonished those people to behave themselves for the present. Dare I produce my wicked deck of cards, having been so reproved? Ah, here’s Fresca with your handsome man-child. You could entrust Phlebas, too, with him, in case of need; no one else; good night.”

  8

  Conversation in the Sewer

  Sweeney and Coriolan stood deep beneath the Lodging, in the old monks’ drain. The air, if oppressive, still was tolerable. Having been disused for centuries, the sewer was not foul underfoot, nor very wet. A trickle of water, from a narrow opening high up, near the head of the sewer, ran down the stone wall and along the floor of the whole sloping drain.

  For the most part, the sewer was cut neatly, with infinite labor, through living rock; but when it passed through some small natural cavity or earthy area, it was faced with blocks of ashlar, so carefully hewn that little mortar had been needed between the joints. At more than one point, a thin seam of coal ran through the mass of rock. Observing this, Coriolan said casually, “Up the brae beyond the den head, the Balgrummo Pits gave the Inchburns their fortune, beginning about 1760.”

  This sewer channel was far taller than a man’s head; yet it was narrow, barely wide enough for Sweeney and Coriolan to walk through it. Their shoulders almost brushed the walls.

  “It’s better than I had expected, Mr. Sweeney,” Coriolan said. “Do you know, sanitation in medieval times, at least the monks’, was superior to what came later? Why, once Reggie Fairlie, the architect, was asked to look into the sewers of Melville House, in Fife-splendid seventeenth-century house, that; you ought to visit it. It seemed that the drains were hopelessly clogged. Well, Fairlie explored the main sewer, quite as we’re doing, and found that it led to a huge underground brick chamber, bigger than a ballroom. That chamber was utterly Filled with dung, to the roof! It had taken three centuries to stuff it, but capacity was reached at last. Here, it seems, the monks flushed the refuse through this drain into the Fettinch Moss. I take it that they must have been able to divert water from the burn into this channel-perhaps there was a sluice by the pond, and the water entered through that aperture high up-the hole we noticed a few minutes ago, with the trickle still coming out of it.”

  This Coriolan was damned loquacious. Friendly though he seemed, Sweeney was uneasy with the man. Bain, or Coriolan, must be a really tough type: having had only a few hours’ rest after his fall in the Den, here Coriolan was beside him, little the worse for wear, making himself useful. Sweeney didn’t know how he’d have managed without this help. In the light of their carbide lamps, Coriolan-Bain’s strong face stood out eerily against the dank stone. For a bum, it was a good enough face.

  What with charts and suggestions that the Archvicar had produced, they had found their way into the drain with surprising ease. Gerontion had uncovered old plans of the Lodging in the Muniment Room. The Weem Fathers’ necessarium, Gerontion had declared, must have been what was now a storeroom at the back of the oldest wing of the Lodging. Supervised by the Archvicar, they two had tapped that dreary room’s floor, and had come to suspect that a hollow space lay beneath one wall. Lifting broad flagstones, they had discovered a narrow gulf below, its walls of quarried ashlar at that point.

  Sweeney and Coriolan had fetched a ladder and gone down into the dark, with trepidation. “Into the hollow dark, my dear friends,” the Archvicar had murmured as they descended; of course the old toad was too crippled to accompany them. This being an exploratory trip merely, they had not taken any of Apollinax’s acolyte-boys as assistants. Gerontion had extracted from some outbuilding several miners’ hats with carbide lamps fixed to them, and forethoughtfully he had brought a supply of carbide to the Lodging with him. The two of them wore the helmets, which were about seventy years old, Gerontion said; also they carried electric torches at their belts.

  They had groped along the sewer, so solidly constructed that no fallen rubble obstructed their way. Once, though, Coriolan’s foot had kicked something, and he had picked the object up to examine it. It was a sculptured fragment, a stone hand with most of the fingers missing and part of a stone forearm. “Gothic,” Coriolan had said, “from the Templars’ time or the later monks’. Faith was flung into the sewer.”

  Sweeney hadn’t given a damn. His foot still hurt, but it had turned out that the devil-boy’s shotgun had broken no bones. For nobody but Apollinax would Sweeney have ventured into this ghastly bilge-hole. What Apollinax had said and implied to him, after the defeat at the pend, had made Sweeney dread the Master more than ever he had feared any man before. Why, it was a positive relief to be down here in this collective anus, out of range of Apollinax’s eyes.

  They had followed the main drain what seemed an interminable way, until at last they had come to the point where the sewer sloped down into black water; Sweeney, almost tumbling in, had wet himself to the knees. Ugh! But what was more horrid, this sewer was precisely like the passage through which he had traveled in his nightmare, only forty-eight hours earlier.

  It was a very, very long drain. “We’re well beyond the policies, probably at the edge of the Fettinch Moss,” Coriolan had suggested. “Like enough the Moss is broader and deeper now than it was when the Priory stood here: the monks would have drained much of it and cultivated the ground.”

  He had poked into the water with an iron rod. “Humm! Right here, the drain is choked with rubble. Who could have fetched it down all this way? And did they choke it deliberately? Even if we had divers’ equipment, we couldn’t push much distance beyond this point without huge trouble.”

  They had turned back up the sewer. The place gave Sweeney the shakes-hoo-ha! This drain of his nightmare undermined his sense of reality. But of course the sketch-maps and the hints which Gerontion had left with him, that first night at the Lodging, must have worked on his fancy to produce the vision of the underground channels. Still, if he had heard “knock knock knock” and come upon that dead file of his nightmare, he wouldn’t have been much surprised down here.

  It had remained to explore certain short side passages which led off from the main sewer; it was hard to tell whether these had been constructed later than the principal channel. They were unrewarding. Two clearly had been blocked overhead, but their original apertures must have opened merely into garderobes of the Lodging, or the preceding Priory, and not into the Weem-supposing there ever had been a Weem. Sweeney and Coriolan now stood in the third of these passages, which was odder, with no indication that the hole of a jakes had ever been pierced through its roof. Both men were nearly exhausted; they leaned against the clammy wall before closer inspection.

  “Hell, hell, hell!” Sweeney was muttering. Would he ever get out of this? If they didn’t find a way into the Weem, there would be Apollinax to pay. If they did find a way, things might get even rougher.

  “Damn it, it’s a path to nowhere,” Sweeney grunted.

  “Shall we have a closer look at the back wall of th
is little passage?” Coriolan spoke as mildly as if he were offering to do a barnyard chore in exchange for a square meal. “When I was a boy I used to hear the old tales of a cave under the Lodging, but my rationalist father-do you know, we lived less than two miles from here-said the stories were rubbish.”

  “Your dad had his head screwed on right,” said Sweeney. “We’re wasting time down here. Come on back up top.”

  But Coriolan was poking at the rear wall with a chisel in his right hand, continuing his discourse as he inspected.

  “Somehow the Ancient Monuments Commission became a trifle interested in rumors about the Weem, in Alec Balgrummo’s time, and asked to be allowed to pry about; ‘Ruins’ Richardson himself wrote to Lord Balgrummo. But old Balgrummo wouldn’t let them in the front door.”

  He fell silent while driving in his chisel a little way with a mason’s hammer; then he resumed. “Purgatory or whatever it may have been, the place was sealed by the Archbishop of St. Andrews about 1500. Columbus had discovered America, and earthly Purgatories were going out of fashion, along with much else. Getting rid of spiritual Purgatories is another matter, though. And why should we wish to be rid of them? Since most of us aren’t saints, our alternative to Purgatory is Hell.”

  “So nobody’s been down the Weem since the sixteenth century, you mean?”

  Coriolan was probing at the terminal wall with a short crowbar, the acetylene glare of his carbide hat-lamp disclosing blocks of ashlar. “I didn’t say that, old man, and I didn’t mean that.”

  Sweeney scowled at Coriolan’s strong back. Although one of the few normal-looking people at the Lodging, intellectually Coriolan was a conundrum. Half the time you’d swear that he was a lame-brained tramp, and the other half of the time he sounded like a professor of history.

  Coriolan’s big tranquil face with its light blue eyes, its prominent nose, its deep scar running almost the length of the left cheek-that face, for all its seeming openness, could not be read. The discomfiting thought passed through Sweeney’s brain that this Coriolan, or Bain, might be a cunning detective. Could Scotland Yard be on the scent of smuggled kalanzi, or inquisitive about what Apollinax was up to here? Yet what policeman would have chosen to come down to the Lodging that breakneck way, with the odds ten to one that he’d have smashed every bone in his body? Only a Keystone Cop would have done that. Or what detective would be learned about the sixteenth century and earlier?

  Sweeney directed the torch more accurately upon the narrow wall face. The masonry-yes, blocks of stone here, not native rock—was dry, but beyond that wall might lie an abyss of black water or a trap of firedamp.

  Coriolan ran his hairy fingers along the joints of the ashlar blocks; he peered closely at the wall, Sweeney holding the electric torch over his shoulder. “See here, Sweeney, old chap: no trace of mortar between these joints! The monks used some mortar everywhere else in these drains, where they needed masonry. Higher with that torch, please. Aha! Now look sharp: this great long stone, almost as high as my head, seems to have the function of a lintel. Heartening, eh? I fancy that someone once chiseled the mortar out from between these stones, because there had been a doorway in this wall once, and could be again. Whether the blocks could be extracted now without bringing everything down on our heads, I can’t say at the moment.”

  Coriolan squeezed aside so that Sweeney could have a look at the wall face. Indeed this wall differed from the others in the sewer; indeed that long horizontal stone did look like a lintel. Sweeney could see how it might be just possible to create an opening below it-though through terribly hard labor in this cramped space, and then with no certainty of finding anything behind the wall but native rock. “If this is a kind of doorway, when was it made, Bain-Coriolan, I mean?”

  “Why, Sweeney, it’s later than the sewers, I fancy. My knowing the history of this place is of some help. This looks like late sixteenth-century work, hastily done, though the blocks themselves come from older work, I take it. The third Laird of Balgrummo, called the Warlock, may have had this done-this, and more.”

  “Why?”

  “To make a temporary new entrance to the Weem, I suppose, replacing the grand entrance, the Pilgrims’ Stair, that had been destroyed seventy years before, on orders from Rome. It seems to have been his ambition to restore the Pilgrims’ Stair, but we don’t know how far he had proceeded with that project. Some thought in his time that he was establishing in the Weem a false religion or witches’ coven; also it’s been suggested that he was merely trying to open a secret place for Catholic recusants to celebrate mass-with hidie-holes for fugitive Roman priests.

  “Probably he had his men work at restoring the Pilgrims’ Stair chiefly from below, they getting to the foot of the Stair through this little tunnel that lies before us. Architecturally, this privy way into the Weem was clever of the Laird, don’t you think?

  “Then, when Morton stormed the Lodging, the Third Laird must have blown up both the work of restoration on the Pilgrims’ Stair, and this tunnel before us. We don’t know how thoroughly the Third Laird’s gunpowder may have broken down the Weem; for all we can tell just now, there may be only ruin beyond this masonry.”

  Sweeney had his doubts. “How could the Third Laird have had time to put these stones back into place, if the Regent’s men were hot after him? For that matter, how could he and his men have sealed this tunnel from the outside, if they were on the inside?”

  Coriolan chuckled. “You’re quite right, Sweeney, in saying that it couldn’t have been the Third Laird who sealed up this doorway. Doubtless he blew up both entrances to the Weem, if there were two then, to baffle Morton. No, this present wall just in front of our eyes, or at least the part of it blocking the old doorway, must have been built by other hands, later.”

  “You mean that the Earl of Morton walled his enemy in?”

  “I don’t think that. No doubt Morton hoped to break through the rubble on the Pilgrims’ Stair, in search of the Laird’s money, but it must have been slow and perilous work, and Morton hadn’t time enough: he fell from power only a few days later. If Morton and his men knew about this side entrance from the drain, they may have attempted that, too. But Morton’s people mayn’t have discovered this sewer access at all: one doesn’t think immediately of searching a disused sewer for an entrance to a shrine, and the jakes of the Priory necessarium may have been overlaid with flagstones in the Third Laird’s time, as now. Morton’s people may have had no notion of how Inchburn and his surviving men contrived to escape into the Weem, except that somehow they must have made their desperate way down the wrecked Pilgrims’ Stair. Or even if Morton’s men did find this drain postern here, the tunnel back of this wall must have been choked with rubble from the Laird’s petards.”

  Now Coriolan was inserting his chisel in cracks between the stones about halfway to the vaulted roof. “Risky, risky... Why, the walling-up of this doorway may have been done not many years later, by the Fourth Laird, who affected to be a pillar of the Kirk of Scotland. He’d have wanted no one to go the way his father had gone, down the road to Avernus.”

  Sweeney wished to know whether the Third Laird might have slipped out of the Weem by a third route. This meant another digression by Coriolan, and Sweeney hated to linger here, but he must have some hopeful news to take back to Apollinax. Coriolan continued his gingerly prying at the stones.

  “What did you say, Sweeney? Another way out? Why, nobody ever saw our mercenary captain the Warlock Laird after he had gone down here wounded. Who knows what he intended? Perhaps to rendezvous with Maitland of Lethington, his old friend, in Fairyland. God have mercy on his soul.”

  Knock knock knock! But it was only Coriolan who had made Sweeney’s heart jump. The tramp had taken up a mason’s hammer and was driving a wedge between joints of masonry.

  “Christ’s sake,” cried Sweeney, in his double fright, “is it safe to work down here?” He had in his mind’s eye a brief vision of himself squashed flat by the collapse of this tunnel
, his body left here below forever, his ghost trailing after the Third Laird’s, up and down and round those cunning passages, knock knock knock.

  “Safe?” Coriolan squatted, prodding with his chisel here and there. “No, old chap. Somewhere above us, in the north face of the oldest part of the Lodging, there’s a mortared crack left from the Third Laird’s explosion down here in his last fight-a crack from top to bottom of the tower. And look at these props here”—Coriolan laid a hand on something Sweeney had not made out in the darkness, one of two pilasters of rock fragments that buttressed the roof of this side passage. “It’s a marvel that the whole complex hasn’t tumbled down, though clearly the Fourth Laird did what he might to secure things. He had good masons and time enough, what with King Jamie’s peace.”

  “So it’s impossible to break through?” Sweeney shuddered to think how Apollinax might rage on being baffled; but it would have been scary work, and he did not really care to see what lay behind that wall with the lintel-stone inserted into it.

  “I don’t say that.” Coriolan had shifted his prying to another area. “It’s dangerous, but the thing has been done before. You suspected that, didn’t you, Sweeney? I see you’re looking at the right spot; you’ve an architect’s eye in your head.”

  Indeed Sweeney could discern now that below the seeming lintel-stone were vertical lines in the masonry, on either side, in effect outlining a vanished rude aperture, through which even a big man might pass, were the ashlar blocks with-drawn-and supposing that the lintel might hold against the weight from above pressing down upon it. This last was doubtful: some subsidence seemed to have occurred in recent years, and a number of the ashlar blocks were bulging outward from the wall.

  “Aye,” Coriolan went on, “it looks to me as if these stone teeth had been drawn not so very many years ago, and then thrust back into place again. Alexander Fillan Inchburn, tenth Baron Balgrummo, went through here.”