Lord of the Hollow Dark

by Russell Kirk

  Phlebas had burst into rapid speech. “Now here’s courage for us, Sweeney,” the Archvicar said, patting his black grotesque on the shoulder. “My foster son asks if he may splash in on our behalf, with our coil of rope round his waist, you and I holding the rope’s end; and he’ll see how deep Styx is, and whither it flows. I will say that he swims like an otter in Kalidu.”

  “God! You won’t let him, will you?”

  “Not just now, for I’m weary of this scouting.”

  Sweeney was weary, too, and so Phlebas must be. But Sweeney said, “What about it? Are we going back to look for those alternative routes and poor crazy Coriolan?”

  The Archvicar shook his head. “It would take us more than one night, Sweeney, that maze: we’d never have got down this far without Balgrummo’s brief directions and a great deal of luck. Balgrummo doesn’t trace in detail any other path through this underworld.”

  “Then what can we do for Coriolan?”

  “Only wait and pray, I fear: he came to us strangely, he has left us strangely. Despite the crack in his head, he’s resourceful. For all we know down here, indeed, already he may have found his way back to the vestibule before us.”

  “But you don’t think so, do you?”

  “No, Sweeney. But pray, if you will.”

  Then they began their hard and tiring return through the blackness, now and again calling out for Coriolan, always disappointed. Sweeney found himself actually praying for Coriolan, or Bain: a friend worth preserving.

  Without those cords to lead them back, Sweeney knew well, they might not have found their way even to the plank bridge, perhaps, and certainly not to the cave with the pool, and then the cave with the cross. But come out of the labyrinth they did. How many hours had they been within? Coriolan was not awaiting them by the pool, or by the cross, or by the little bronze door with the mask of Kronos upon it, nor in the vestibule of the Weem; they knew too well that he would not be waiting for them higher up.

  “Nearly four hours down there, Sweeney,” said the Archvicar, checking his watch. “I’m to give the Master a report at seven in the morning; we can do no more tonight, can we?

  “The terror of that place-fright beyond words, wasn’t it? You did very well indeed, Sweeney: we shall make a hero of you yet. Sleep as late as you can: you’ll need your strength tomorrow night, I suspect.”

  “But Coriolan?”

  “We’ll leave the bronze door unlocked, of course; and there’s water enough for him to drink down there, and he might find his way to our provision hamper.” Sweeney had wondered why the Archvicar hadn’t let them collect their equipment on the road back.

  “How can you keep your cool about it?” Sweeney gave the Archvicar a hard look.

  “Because, old chap, I know that Coriolan has been in tight corners before. Nothing down below can hurt him.”

  Then Sweeney’s taut nerves gave way, and he knew that he was tired beyond belief and shaking with fright, and he flung himself on his cot in the lumber room. Like a magician, the Archvicar produced a different green bottle from a cupboard in that room.

  “One good long swig, Sweeney: no more. There, there, I take it from you as if you were a baby. You must be strong tomorrow, and the rest of us too. Ora pro nobis.”

  The old adventurer and his black familiar seemed to melt from Sweeney’s sight; with frantic speed, vision upon vision, little vignettes of a foolish life, sped through his fancy; they were succeeded by a horrifying glimpse, mercifully brief, of the Dead File by the pool in the Weem, and another of Coriolan splashing furiously in black waters. It was all beyond Sweeney’s control, and like some kalanzi illusion!

  Then he woke just enough to draw a blanket over himself, there in the storeroom, with Coriolan’s empty cot only three or four feet distant from his. Coriolan! Should he go back down the ladder into the sewer, in quest of that good friend Coriolan? But exhaustion now fell upon Sweeney like the Tower of Siloam, and he was swept into dreamless sleep as if he had been carried deep underground by that smooth black river of the Weem.

  15

  The Prisoners of the Muniment Room

  This was the most nearly modern room in the Lodging: Edwardian and almost businesslike. Cabinets and file drawers and cupboards and desks of darkly gleaming wood lined its walls; there was next to no room for pictures, but two handsomely-framed watercolors, looking like Constables, hung above the desks; the rich violet-colored carpet was Chinese. In one wall was set a banklike vault, high enough to walk into. And the outer door of the Muniment Room itself was of steel, almost a vault door. It was closed upon them, and an acolyte-boy with a gun, Marina supposed, guarded it from the other side.

  For a prison, the Muniment Room was elegant enough; there was even a small lavatory attached to it. “I suppose that the last Lord Balgrummo spent infinite time here, poking into his ancestors’ papers,” Madame Sesostris speculated. “He must have done up this room not many years before his Trouble.”

  Marina and Michael, and Madame Sesostris, and Fresca-even here, they still insisted upon the precaution of being called by their Eliot names-had been herded into the Muniment Room just after breakfast, Grishkin directing the three frowzy young men, with guns in their hands, who had done the herding. One of those boys had put a hand on Fresca’s arm, and Fresca’s eyes had burned, so that Marina had been afraid the Sicilian girl might draw her hidden knife; but she hadn’t.

  Grishkin had told them only that they would be given no more food today. She had left with them robes or gowns, ceremonious ones of handsome cloth, scarlet robes for Madame and Fresca, white for Marina. They were to wear these outer robes at the Ceremony of Innocence this night, she had commanded. And then she had produced a really magnificent antique gown, of yellowed silk, a bridal gown; and she had told Marina that she was to wear this beneath her outer robe. Whose was it? Marina had stammered, not daring to ask why. “The last Lady Balgrummo’s, for her wedding,” Grishkin had told her, with merciless candor.

  Madame Sesostris had asked to see the Master; Grishkin had shaken her handsome head, and had locked them in. Now it was nearly noon.

  Where was the Archvicar? Why, he had risen early in the morning, after three or four hours’ sleep, Fresca answered, and had gone down to the Weem again, accompanying Apollinax there. An hour after the Archvicar’s departure, Grishkin and the armed young men had come for the Archvicar’s “hostages to Fortune.” Now they were hostages literally, and something worse, Marina knew. The baby had begun to cry, unusual for him at this hour; Marina was near to wailing herself.

  The two windows of the Muniment Room were heavily barred from the outside with an Italianate grill of wrought iron; that iron pattern, Marina noticed with a start as she stared out in the direction of the front gate, seemed to be a representation of a maze. There was no way to leave the Muniment Room until Apollinax should summon them.

  “Manfredo should have taken that chopper hidden in Balgrummo’s study,” Fresca exclaimed. She was pacing back and forth from steel door to iron-guarded windows.

  Madame Sesostris had spread out her fantastic deck of cards upon a desk. “No, child, he couldn’t have concealed so big a weapon on his body, and he says we contend against dominations and powers, and that we mustn’t draw the first blood in this haunted house, if blood’s to be drawn.”

  The old lady was selecting some cards from her pack, rejecting others. “Here’s Saturno, or Kronos: that’s Apollinax. Here’s Misero, Misery: let him be Sweeney. Take Fameio, the faithful servant, for Phlebas. Then Chavalier, or Knight: who better for our Manfred? Beside him, Forteza, or Strength, toppling her pillar, a lion by her feet: that’s your very self, Fresca. I take Astrologia for myself, in my present role. For Coriolan? I am not sure of him; but let us represent him by Chronico, the Genius of Time, winged. Clearly, my dear Marina, you are Charita, unselfish love.”

  “But my baby?” Marina bent bewildered over the cards.

  “I have no card of an infant in isolation. But I know: litt
le Michael shall be the cosmic principle of Speranza, Hope, always next to Charita; here the card is.”

  They might as well play at little trifling games, Marina thought, for nothing else could be done now. “Will you find cards for Grishkin, and all the disciples, and all the acolytes?”

  “No, my dear: those are faceless cyphers, impotent, lost. But I do seek one more card, Marina. Prima Causa? No, that would be presumptuous, blasphemous. Let it be rather the Re, this king, scepter in hand, that ‘sneer of cold command’ upon his hard face. Call him Ozymandias; call him King of Terrors.”

  “But who is he, in this house?”

  “Why, Marina, he’s Alexander Fillan Inchburn, last Lord Balgrummo.”

  Marina looked at her with a chill wonder. “A dead man?”

  “A spirit in prison.” Madame Sesostris arranged her chosen cards in a circle. “These are the wanderers in this labyrinth of ours.”

  In her pose of astrologer-clairvoyant, the old lady seemed as eerie as any of Apollinax’s crew. Retreating from the cards, Marina sat down by Fresca; slashing though the Sicilian was-Marina had learned about the lesson she had taught Sweeney-she remained passionately human enough.

  This was Wednesday-Ash Wednesday. Only last Friday, at this hour, Marina had been in London, suffused with joy in anticipation of the Timeless Moment that she was to know. Here at Balgrummo Lodging, five days later, she was a prisoner awaiting some vague indescribable horror, of which the dead lady’s yellowed wedding gown would be part-and she was idling away with occult cards what few hours remained before the catastrophe. She went back to the barred window.

  But she could see nothing from that window-not a shrub, not a tree! A few minutes earlier, from this same window, she had looked at the decayed great oaks and limes and beeches of the forepark. But now, this February morning, such a fog as she never had known before, not even in the foggiest seasons of London, had hung itself about Balgrummo Lodging. Something that she had read recently came upon her, abruptly, madly: “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes...” Yes, right up to those window-panes, the dense mist enshrouded everything, aspiring to thrust its muzzle into the Muniment Room. “Enshrouded”—precisely the right word. This was not night, neither was it day. She gave a low cry of astonishment and dread.

  “What is it?” Fresca joined her at that obscured window. “Ognisanti!” Hearing these exclamations, Madame Sesostris hurried spryly over, no longer pretending to be the tottering death’s head.

  Madame Sesostris drew in her breath. “Oh! I’d not expected that. We seem to be quite out of space, out of time. I wish that His Excellency would come. Well, there’ll be no rescue from outside. Even were anyone from the outside world to look for the Lodging just now, he might find nothing at all.”

  “Is that fog-why, is it real?” Marina clutched the old lady’s wrist.

  Madame Sesostris looked at her for some moments before replying. “In this house, Marina, with Apollinax at his conjuring,” she said then, “I think that ordinary reality may be suspended: I don’t know a better way to express what I mean. This is Ash Wednesday, but here it might be Ash Wednesday in any year, or an Ash Wednesday somehow independent of chronology, don’t you know. Apollinax may have kept out the living world and have summoned the dead; I sense presences... We can call it illusion, if we like; but we exist just now as part and parcel of that illusion, and may perish, physically die, in that illusion conjured up by Apollinax. Our little play will be played out quite apart from whatever may occur today in Edinburgh or London; quite independent of time as time is reckoned ordinarily, almost divorced from the ordinary operations of what we call the laws of nature. One might say that we’re imprisoned within a dream, and that Apollinax is the dreamer.”

  She ran a wrinkled hand across her old forehead. “We’ll find this night whether Apollinax is wholly master of his own dream. The Archvicar says that Apollinax has acquired powers like those which Simon Magus had in Saint Paul’s time—or rather, Apollinax has summoned up those powers for which a price has to be paid. Do come away from these dreadful windows.”

  Why, thought Marina, I’m back in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense again: it’s the Red King’s Dream, and I’m Alice. But no one hurt Alice, actually, even though the Queen did cry, “Off with her head!” How crazy, to go maundering about Alice in this desperate plight! But perhaps it was only comic nonsense that could keep anyone sane in Balgrummo Lodging.

  The Muniment Room was not uncomfortable: among other amenities, it was one of the few rooms in the Lodging to have a gas fire installed in its fireplace. The three of them huddled about that blue-green fire. Sitting there silent, Marina could hear, very faintly, the sound of that chanting—clamorous, eager-in another part of the Lodging. She could see with her vivid mind’s eye the faces of Mrs. Equitone, Eugenides, Madame de Tornquist, de Bailhache, Fraulein von Kulp, Hakagawa, Princess Volupine, Channing-Cheetah, and all the rest, disciples and acolytes, hideously rapt, led by Apollinax with his unfinished face, chanting in frenzy, calling upon the Prince of This World.

  “Oh, I’ve been such a fool,” she sobbed before the other two prisoners, “such a fool to imagine that I could enter into some Timeless Moment!”

  Madame Sesostris’ hand was laid upon hers. “Not a fool to imagine the possibility, Marina: merely a trifle foolish to fancy some Simon Magus could give you that. For a timeless moment, my child, ordinarily comes upon you when you’re unaware and unexpectant; and it comes from faith, from hope, from charity; from having done your work in the world; from the happiness of people you love; or simply as a gift of grace. It can’t be cobbled up by some magician or ordained by some statist.”

  “It may come at the moment of death, but endure forever,” said Fresca.

  “The Timeless Moment is ‘the still point of the turning world,’” the old lady went on, “a moment that is only incidentally Now: it’s a contact with the Eternal and the Other. It may come to us when we are out hill-walking, say, alone, and look down upon fields and woods and a lovely village and the sea beyond-when we know that prospect will be with us forever, and we with it forever. It may come after much prayer and contemplation. It may come in a flash, illuminating, we knowing in the precious moment that we endure beyond time and place and circumstance. It may come to a soldier when he sacrifices himself. It may come to us, bringing peace in the midst of passion, in the sexual union that is blessed. One word we use to describe this experience of timelessness is ‘ecstasy.’”

  “Ecstasy!” Marina shuddered all over her body. “I think that’s what Apollinax is going to push us into tonight-the ecstasy of the animals! Oh, I told you my dream, and you wouldn’t interpret it-it seems so long ago when I told you, up the Den. Is that Apollinax’s Timeless Moment-dancing forever, with animal faces, naked, shameless, down underground, turning into beasts, doing horrible things, on and on, round and round, forever and ever, chanting, screaming, no way out, no past, no future, loving it, loathing it, turning into something not human? Oh, it would be like Hell!” Fresca had produced a rosary from the bosom of her frock, and was muttering energetically, telling her beads, with great swiftness running through prayers in Italian.

  “That seems to be part of what Apollinax intends,” the old lady said hoarsely, “or so the Archvicar thinks. The ‘liturgy,’ the ‘Ceremony of Innocence,’ has been patched together by Apollinax from fragments of Gnostic rituals—from the Cainites, the Sethites, of nineteen centuries ago. And the Archvicar says that Apollinax has mingled a good deal of Mithraic ritual with this, too, because there may have been a Mithraic temple in the Weem once. And part of the ceremony, the worst part, is Apollinax’s own inspiration. The Archvicar only guesses at the very worst, and Grishkin and the disciples and the acolytes don’t know all-they might run, if they did.

  “Apollinax intends something more terrible than that ‘ecstasy of the animals’ dance you saw in your vision. The ceremony would not be li
ke Hell; it would be Hell. And the disciples and the acolytes desire it passionately, what they know of it. The Archvicar says that no one is damned against his will, but many pursue their own damnation. And in all of us there lurks some yearning for damnation, some unholy appetite for a Timeless Moment of complete degradation, smelling ‘corruption in the dish, incense in the latrine, the sewer in the incense,’ ‘descending to the horror of the ape,’ some hankering after a Now of shame which will endure forever. Apollinax offers that, and he has many takers.”

  “Apollinax may kill us, but he can’t damn us,” Fresca burst out. “He’s only a man.”

  “He can corrupt, but he cannot damn,” Madame told them. “If we don’t consent, he can destroy nothing but our bodies—though he may think that he’s master of Time, or that he’s Time himself, Time the Devourer. But is Apollinax a man only? He thinks that something Other has entered into him; the Archvicar says that indeed ‘possession’ occurs, though rarely, and that an Other may have taken possession of the man called Apollinax, with that man’s eager consent. Apollinax sought, and found, and was given his heart’s desire. Once I knew a possessed man who lived in Cheyne Walk. Why not one in this memory-soaked house?”

  She shuffled her strange cards, the chosen cards, absently. “There’s more than one sort of dream, and there’s more than one sort of ecstasy. There is the high dream, from between the gates of horn, the vision of the transcendent. There is the low dream, from between the gates of ivory, the vision of fallen man. Also there is the ecstasy of salvation, the moment beyond moments in which one rises out of here and now to an eternity of love and beauty; and the ecstasy of damnation, the moment beyond moments in which one sinks beneath here and now to an eternity of hatred and horror.

  “With all his powers, Apollinax has dreamed the low dream, the lowest of all dreams, the vilest of visions; and tonight, with all his powers, Apollinax means to cast us into that ecstasy of damnation, that ecstasy of beasts and of worse than beasts. And of that ecstasy, he means, there shall be no end. Except for Apollinax himself, the Archvicar says, no one is meant to leave this house alive; but in the ecstasy of the damned, every spirit shall dwell in this house forever, in this house of the Lord of This World.”