Lord of the Hollow Dark

by Russell Kirk

  What did these disciples do all day? The acolytes were kept busy cooking and cleaning and serving-and, she understood, standing guard; Grishkin had plenty of concerns; doubtless the Master was praying and meditating and perfecting his plans for the liturgy of Wednesday night. But those twelve unlikely disciples? Did they pray long and earnestly? Somehow Marina doubted it. They all seemed somnolent, like snakes basking in the sun while waiting for a mouse to run recklessly close to them-though certainly Balgrummo Lodging was no sun-baked house. Was she, Marina, to be their prize mouse? What an odd egotistical notion! She dismissed it promptly.

  Well, Fraulein von Kulp, to judge by the Archvicar’s innuendos, was lively enough at night. What had the Fraulein seen, or thought she had seen? Probably she was a neurotic type; she looked it; a fingernail-biter. Perhaps the supposed apparition had been merely another of the disciples, passing by chance along that hall, and frightened out of his or her wits by the Fraulein’s loud lamentations. It was easy, here in Balgrummo Lodging, to let fancies run away with one’s self.

  How this house rambled on! She hurried after Dusty, her surly conductress. It was so easy to daydream here, even while one was walking along corridors and through magnificent high rooms. These fancies really did run away with one, if one wasn’t on guard here, even in broad daylight. Fancies! Some lines were running through her imagination: fancies curled round images, clinging; how did it go-yes, “The notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.” It must come, this passage, from her Eliot volume; she’d had time to read nothing else.

  “Wake up; here you are,” Dusty said, rudely enough, in the manner of a salesperson who doesn’t expect a shabby customer to call at the shop again. They stood outside a handsome door with a polished brass plate upon it, and on that brass plate, in elegant lettering, the words “Counting Room.”

  “The king was in his countinghouse, counting out his money,” ran insanely through Marina’s brain. She was shown in by Dusty, and there sat Mr. Apollinax at a broad old-fashioned desk, some great sheets of paper or linen, looking like house plans, laid upon it. Marina turned pale, now that at last she could ask the Master those profound questions about the Timeless Moment. “Along came a blackbird and snipped off her nose.” Bother! She mustn’t think and speak like an idiot, not at this interview. Marina almost wished she never had come to Balgrummo Lodging.

  Apollinax rose from his desk to greet her, that wondrous flawed face of his smiling his unique little mysterious smile. “Marina,” he said, “I can give you only a few minutes just now, for I have these charts to study.” He pointed at the sheets on the table. “We seem to have discovered the first portion of the way into the Weem, the Purgatory. I shall go down there myself, in half an hour, to inspect what’s being done. After all, we could not fail; I had willed that the way be cleared for me; but everything must be in readiness for Wednesday, so we have no time to lose.”

  It seemed odd that the Master should speak of time-he who held the key to the Timeless Moment. “I’m glad,” said Marina, and then was tongue-tied. Indeed, she felt very like Alice confronting the Caterpillar.

  The Master-why, his face did remind one a trifle of the Caterpillar’s face-frowned slightly. “Don’t keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute... Why, the smoke alone is worth a thousand pounds a puff!” Oh, why did that nonsense come into her feeble brain? Oh, why was she so overawed, so bashful, so perturbed?

  “You have a question or two to ask me?” Apollinax urged, with a slight suggestion of impatience.

  “One thing is this, Mr. Apollinax,” Marina began. “If a person has been married to a person who didn’t turn out well—who turned out not to love the first person, I mean—why, will I, or the first person, be with the other person in a Timeless Moment?”

  “The shame of such things will be burnt to ashes,” said the Master.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean the shame. What I meant to say was, can one get back the first days of love, or what a person thought was love, and keep them always?”

  “Love?” said the Master. “All love of man and woman is snare and delusion; renounce all love of created beings, forever.”

  “I see,” Marina murmured. A stern old nun in the convent might have told her the same; it was not the answer she had hoped for, not the answer at all.

  “You have something else to ask?”

  She stood confused. “I’m sorry, Mr. Apollinax-I know you’re so very busy-but I’m trying to recollect some really important question I meant to put to you.” Oh, her vacant mind, now of all times! The Master waited, impassive. If only he weren’t so formidable! He had been different when he had called upon her in London. Playing for time, but with a genuine sympathetic impulse, she said, holding out Michael in his blue blanket, “Would you like to take my baby and bless him?”

  The Master seemed scarcely to have noticed the baby before, as if he rarely noticed babies; one couldn’t expect it of somebody above earthly passions, Marina supposed. Now he glanced at Michael critically, as if he were judging a piglet.

  “No,” said the Master, almost with aversion.

  Marina quivered. “I’m sorry,” she begged, “I didn’t meant to be sentimental and silly, but he’s such a good baby. Oh, now I know what I wanted to ask, and it’s this: will my baby and I be together always in the Timeless Moment that is going to occur here?”

  “Yes,” said the Master, his strange smile returning. “Yes, I promise you that, Marina. To the end of time and beyond, you and your baby shall be together.”

  Tears ran down Marina’s cheeks. “How can I thank you, Mr. Apollinax, Master? That was what I wanted most of all, even more than the first thing. Oh, you’ll make us both so happy!”

  “Will I?” said the Master. The smile moved again upon his thin lips, and then vanished.

  “Please, then, just one more question.” Marina feared that this would sound ungrateful, when actually she meant to be humble. “I was wondering... Well, why did you invite me here-me, of all people? I don’t seem to fit in-I mean, I’m so unimportant, and these twelve disciples of yours are so different from me, and are there supposed to be thirteen disciples?”

  “You despise them because they have been great sinners?” the Master asked.

  “No, no, I wasn’t thinking of that-I don’t know them-but I’m just nothing. Wasn’t it Baudelaire who said that it’s better to be a great sinner than to be nothing at all? But you said that my own sin doesn’t count for anything, or you implied that, when we were in London. If that’s so, I’m nothing, because I haven’t done anything really good in my life. So what am I to do here, Master? Am I worthy?”

  The Master made a placating gesture with his right hand. “Without you, Marina, our Ceremony of Innocence would be inconceivable.” The Master’s sternness diminished. “And this baby of yours, too-he will have his high part in our ritual of Ash Wednesday. Of sinners, I can find enough and to spare; but for our ceremony, you and the baby are jewels beyond price. What are you to do? That you shall learn at the beginning of the ceremony itself. Are you worthy? None worthier, none more welcome.”

  “Master, Master!” Marina, holding the baby against her shoulder, reached out impulsively to take his hand, but Apollinax withdrew slightly. Did he fear that the virtue would go out of him at her touch? What could she say, in her joy? “How can I repay you?” That had been a foolish thing to say: a Timeless Moment can have no price. “I’m stupid!” she wailed aloud.

  “You are, Marina,” said the Master, “but you shall forget that and much else in the ecstasy of our Timeless Moment.” Of a sudden he turned businesslike. “Now I have something to tell you.” He tinkled a bell that lay upon his desk. Grishkin appeared from an inner room.

  “The Gerontion file,” Mr. Apollinax demanded. Grishkin went to a heavy cabinet, unlocked it, produced a folder, and departed. How handsome, how cruel she looked!

  Mr. Apollinax extracted two typewritten pages, glanced over them brief
ly, and turned his fascinating eyes upon Marina. “In your short residence here, Marina, you have been much with Gerontion and his wife. I do not object to that; it is well enough that someone should watch over you until the ceremony, for the disciples and the acolytes have their odd ways. But the Archvicar does not love me. I have known him a long while, by correspondence and through couriers; yet we did not meet face to face until I brought him to this house to serve us. As I had expected, he is a sneering, doubting thing, malicious. I do not wish you to be deceived by him. Keep on your guard. Until the ceremony, continue to associate with him and his wife, but do not trust what they may say. If he tells you of any plans to leave this house, or to interrupt the ceremony, come to me and inform me.”

  Marina was aghast. “Sit down, sit down,” said the Master, noticing her pallor. “I didn’t know you would be so distressed.”

  “It’s that they were only people here who seemed kind.” The baby, as if sensing his mother’s unhappiness, began to wail faintly. Mr. Apollinax scowled.

  “Hush, hush, baby,” Marina whispered, patting Michael’s back. To the Master, “I know that the Archvicar seems cynical, but I’ve never thought of him as—as evil.”

  “Read this,” said the Master. He handed to Marina the two typewritten sheets. The first sheet bore the heading “Summary of Record of T. M. A. Gerontion, styled Archvicar in the Church of the Divine Mystery, aliases...” There followed a long string of aliases, the first of which was Omanwallah. This was a very official-looking document, a kind of police dossier, Marina supposed.

  Before this man called Gerontion or Omanwallah had come to Scotland, Marina read, he had been imprisoned in an African country, Hamnegri, for trafficking in narcotics and for five homicides resulting from such traffic. He had been born in Bombay, the son of a Parsee father, but educated in England and elsewhere. All his life, it seemed, he had done evil, changing his name, his occupation, his identification papers, his very appearance-again and again.

  This Gerontion or Omanwallah had been indicted repeatedly for serious crimes, although usually acquitted. Witnesses against him had disappeared opportunely. He had been tried for necromancy in the Shan States, charged with having raised a little child from the dead and having made the thing do his bidding; tried also for poisoning two widows in Madras; for a colossal criminal fraud in Johannesburg; for kidnaping a young woman, never found, in Ceylon; for manufacturing and selling dangerous preparations in several countries. Except for the affair in Hamnegri, he seemed to have gone free or to have received only fines or light sentences. And even in Hamnegri, it appeared, the toxicologist had been pardoned after a year; bribery was implied in this record. Marina read to the end, openmouthed.

  “Now you see,” said the Master. “Be on your guard, Marina.” He took back the papers. “Gerontion has his uses for me, but he can bite. In this work of mine, for high ends, I find it necessary to employ, sometimes, persons that I loathe. Now go back to Gerontion and his wife, and tell them nothing of this, and do not show that you suspect them. They will be dealt with before long.”

  Trembling, Marina rose, and Grishkin showed her out. Could she trust no one in this house but her baby—and Mr. Apollinax, of course? Yet the Master was so different from what he had seemed in London, so distant, so—unlovely! Somehow she found her way back to her room, past Ger-ontion’s closed door, and flung herself upon the bed, clutching Michael, sobbing and sobbing.

  She must have cried herself to sleep, and slept for three hours at least; she was roused by a rap at her door. “You’ve missed lunch, my dear,” came Madame Sesostris’ voice, “but that’s no great pity. The Archvicar and I brought some biscuits and cheese with us to this house, and there’s to be a picnic of sorts by the pond, and won’t you join us?”

  Her impulse, of course, was to refuse. But then she remembered Mr. Apollinax’s stern injunction not to let the Archvicar and his wife suspect that she knew. Could she act a part? She had tried, in amateur theatricals. “Coming,” she called, with a quaver, and tidied herself, and carried out the baby to join Madame Sesostris.

  The Archvicar, with Phlebas helping him up the slope, already had made his slow way to the pond and its ancient dam. Fresca had carried the picnic hamper. There Gerontion sat on the grass, his back against a kind of sluice-gate structure, looking sufficiently skeptical, but no picture of incarnate evil. “A man may smile and smile, and be a villain still”—who had written that? Marina found it difficult to respond convincingly to the Archvicar’s welcome.

  A living wall of tall unpruned rhododendrons screened the little picnic party from the breeze and from the eyes of anyone at the back of the Lodging. This was a very private place—to Marina’s disquiet, for now she knew that her companions were frightfully dangerous people, and no one else was within sight or hearing.

  The cheese—from Orkney, it turned out—and the biscuits were laid upon paper napkins. “We’ve no hot tea, alas,” Madame Sesostris lamented, “but the Archvicar assures us that the burn’s water is quite pure, if a trifle peaty tasting, and we’ve filled a pitcher with that, and we’ve tumblers. Fall to, my dear.”

  Marina munched these provisions hungrily, but in silence. Phlebas, squatting on his heels, paddled with one hand in the pond, looking most savage. Fresca, like some beautiful cat, stared hard at Marina, as if sensing her mood; she had not given Fresca the baby. The water rushed noisily over the dam of rubble which confined the pond—the old monks’ capacious fish pond, Madame Sesostris had told Marina yesterday. They were a few rods distant from a seventeenth-century dovecote, or “doocot,” like a gigantic beehive, no doubt the source from which Phlebas had requisitioned their fresh eggs.

  “My dear, you’re very pale,” said Madame Sesostris. Marina tried in vain to invent some casual reply.

  “She’s had her talk with the Master; so she is pale,” the Archvicar pronounced.

  Oh, it was so like something from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, this picnic conversation, but terrifying, and real, and Marina sat speechless, as if on trial.

  “Apollinax talked of us, I fancy,” Madame Sesostris ventured.

  “Of course he would, sooner or later.” The Archvicar lit one of his cheroots. “Marina, you told me of what you dreamed night before last. Now let me tell you of what I dreamed that same night; it has some bearing on your situation and on ours.”

  “I’d like to hear it,” said Marina, insincerely. She was atremble. What a charade all this was! This beautiful old house falling to ruin, these half-wild doomed policies, this burlesque of a country-house weekend of yesteryear, these depraved or murderous human grotesques dining formally and miserably: all like a world turned upside down, awaiting the Last Trump!

  “My dream,” the Archvicar commenced, “is even more difficult to put into words than was yours, Marina. But like the original Sweeney, ‘I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you.’”

  Marina compelled herself to look directly at Gerontion, hoping that she appeared unconcerned.

  “When I went to bed night before last, after a talk with the Master and dear Apeneck,” the Archvicar said, “I was tired and apprehensive. I must have fallen asleep immediately; but Fresca knows more about that than I do.”

  Why Fresca? Marina wondered. Why not Grizel Sesostris, his wife?

  “What I can tell you in words,” he was saying, “is only a faint shadow of what I experienced in my sleep.” The Archvicar sat up straight and took off those peculiar goggles of his; Marina was astounded to find the old man’s eyes clear, sparkling, full of mischief. Old? Erect and without those smoked lenses, the Archvicar seemed twenty years younger. He spoke crisply, with no trace of that chi-chi accent.

  “First, as I slept-though of course I did not know that I slept-came blinding light, conceivably Pascal’s ‘fire, fire, fire’—but not light from Pascal’s source, I’m sure. There were whirligigs of excruciating color, purples, greens, reds. And I was swept away, and for a time was conscious of nothing, as if exiled to infinite spa
ce. When consciousness returned, I was transformed, and did not know whence I had come. The interval between one consciousness and another, incidentally, was somewhat like the blackness I had known, or rather not known, that time when I lay shot in the back by the Fords of Krokul—but I must tell you of that African episode some other day, Marina.”

  Here Fresca touched his arm and said something in an Italian dialect, very low. The Archvicar nodded. “The girl wonders whether we are quite safe from observation or intrusion just here; she suspects that I am about to become indiscreet of speech. We’ll remedy that, if you please. Behold our privy chamber!”

  He pointed to an enormous ancient yew tree a little higher up the den, overlooking the pond and commanding a good view of the house. The yew’s branches, dense, swept the ground. “Shall we hide there?”

  Up to the yew they went; the Archvicar, now undisguisedly erect, almost sprang up the slope, swinging his stick. He parted some branches, and the little party entered a broad space beneath the yew, very like a vaulted room; they must be invisible, and perhaps inaudible, from without. Phlebas was set with his back against the trunk to guard their rear. “The Third Laird is said to have plotted with Maitland of Lethington under this tree,” the Archvicar instructed them.

  They sat down again. Marina had to exert all her will to keep herself from shaking visibly. Had they taken her to this dim retreat meaning to interrogate her, or worse? But Gerontion, that bland criminal in many lands, went on with his narration.