Lord of the Hollow Dark

by Russell Kirk

  She had spoken like a sibyl, like a Norn, this pretended cartomancer, this old Englishwoman withered by the African sun.

  Marina was slipping from her chair; she knew it, but was powerless; Fresca caught her in her arms. Madame Sesostris rummaged frantically through her purse: “My salts of ammonia! Ah, here we are!” She thrust the little golden filigree bottle under Marina’s nose. “Oh, Marina, there was no other way than to tell you my hard truths. There’s so little time left to us, and you must be strong against the ecstasy, proof against the horror and against the terrible pain if it comes, and not consent at all, even in the agony...”

  “Here they come!” Fresca hissed. The heavy door of the Muniment Room had opened, and Grishkin entered, and others behind her.

  But this was no last summons. It was the Archvicar and Sweeney and Phlebas whom Grishkin had brought. Behind them, in the doorway, Marina could see three armed acolytes, two of them grinning, one scowling. The scowling one had a swollen eye.

  Grishkin had brought three more robes-two of them scarlet, but a black one for the Archvicar. “We’ll come for you at ten o’clock,” she said. “All of you must be robed then. We shall proceed first to the chapel, then to the Weem. The Bride”—she looked at Marina—“must be gowned by the time we come for all of you.” With her dancer’s step, she turned to go.

  But the Archvicar laid a hand upon her arm. “Grishkin,” he said, earnestly-not in the chaffing tone he used so often—“Grishkin, Simon Magus had such a one as you: she was called Helena, and Simon said that she was the First Conception of his own divine mind, the mother of all things on earth. But truly Helena was a whore whom he had purchased in Tyre.

  “Now I know your true name: it’s Carmella di Stefano, and I was acquainted with you slightly in Rome, and better in Haggat, though not carnally. I’d have spoken to you of this earlier; but there was no good opportunity, and it would have been dangerous for me. This moment is our last time for talk.”

  She was looking at him blankly.

  “Don’t you remember me from Haggat, under another name-not at all? Listen to me: I am risking everything by telling you this.”

  Marina had risen, and was standing close to Grishkin. Into Grishkin’s hard contemptuous stare there seemed to come, if for a second, some bewildered recollection; her lips parted, but she said nothing; she and the Archvicar were staring into each other’s eyes. The Archvicar removed his goggles, so changing his whole appearance.

  “Send those acolytes away,” the Archvicar whispered to her. “You’re in peril, Carmella. Apollinax won’t spare you; though I don’t sleep with him, I know more than you do about what he intends. I’ll give one more hostage to Fortune; I can save you, or try to, if you’ll permit me. You’re no more Grishkin than Helena was the First Conception. Come out from under the kalanzi! Close that door, and stay here with us for five minutes, and I’ll tell you...”

  The caressing, persuasive voice, the lively insistent look, did not suffice. For the bewilderment, the hesitation, the hint of longing had passed out of Grishkin’s green eyes. With all her strength, she slapped the Archvicar across his face. A ring upon her hand cut his lip, and a little blood trickled down his chin.

  The Archvicar looked at her still, as if hoping for a return of her momentary incertitude. Then the Archvicar’s earnestness departed, and his bland mocking mask reappeared. He bowed.

  “Well struck, my Grishkin with promise of pneumatic bliss! You’ve drawn the first blood. Now go to your mirabilary lover, and present my compliments, and tell him that the Archvicar will endeavor to call an essence from the abyss this night, and that the Archvicar felicitates him upon Grishkin, as faithful a whore as ever Helena was to Simon Magus.”

  Grishkin struck him again, full force: the Archvicar did not flinch. Out she went, locking the door behind her.

  The Archvicar touched his silk handkerchief to his lip. “That was a last-minute desperate venture. She didn’t quite remember a certain Manfred Arcane, but I nearly struck home when I mentioned her peril, and I think that she recollected her old name. She’s been under careful doses of kalanzi too long, and her heart was hard before that. More’s the pity, for she’s a handsome thing.”

  “Manfredo, what a risk you took in telling her so much!” Fresca spoke in English and flung her arms about the Archvicar, considerably to Sweeney’s surprise and envy.

  “She may tell it all to Apollinax, I know,” the Archvicar assented, “but he’s under no illusion that I love him, and there’s no time left for him to discipline me before the ceremony, and he can’t dispense with me entirely before the ceremony’s done. Had I told her my real name-why, we’d need to make contingency plans, and those probably would fail. But so long as he thinks me Gerontion, we’ll proceed with my present scheme. Alas for what was Carmella! I’ve failed as a fisher of women, my Pomegranate.”

  “Now where’s Coriolan?” Madame Sesostris was asking. “Will he be brought up here later?”

  “We couldn’t find him,” said Sweeney, heavily. “He went into the Weem last night, and he hasn’t come out. The Archvicar and Phlebas and Apollinax and I, with three devil-boys, went in some distance this morning, but there was no trace of him.”

  “A strange one, that man!” Madame pursed her lips. “Your Excellency, ought we to have done the same thing? I suppose it’s altogether too late now? It may have been clever of Coriolan, what with the ceremony at hand.”

  “Sweeney and I might have done it,” the Archvicar answered, “but Apollinax’s people never would have let the rest of you get so far as the monks’ drain, let alone the Weem. Besides, they would have come in for us, with guns; or they might simply have locked the bronze door, as they’ve locked it upon Coriolan, and that would have been the Third Laird’s disaster all over again. No, the Ceremony of Innocence must include us; later I’ll tell you what frantic ploys have entered my old addled head. But what are we doing, standing here like simpletons? Sit down, all of you, and we’ll commence our council of war.”

  Seeking a chair, Sweeney found himself confronting Marina. “Sorry about the other night,” he said, stumbling over his words. “It was the kalanzi. The Archvicar took the rest of that stuff away from me.”

  Marina said nothing.

  “Do me the favor of forgiving your enemy Apeneck, Marina.” The Archvicar bowed to her. “We may find him ‘gude at neid,’ and certain experiences in the Weem have chastened him, as has our sharp-clawed Sicilian cat here. Why, already we’re making a man of him. Did you notice the blackened eye of that devil-boy Pereira, standing in the doorway just now? When that crew came to collect us below stairs, Pereira imprudently snatched away Sweeney’s rum bottle and smashed it; and our regenerate Sweeney knocked him down, pistol or no pistol. We had rather a tense ten seconds, but Grishkin restrained the rash acolyte: Sweeney is to be saved for the ceremony.”

  “That’s cold comfort for Mr. Sweeney,” Madame Sesostris said. “Your Excellency has been below stairs nearly all day. Will you look out the window now?”

  The Archvicar did that, and gave a low whistle. “Sweeney, come here!”

  It was as if Balgrummo Lodging had been “mothballed” the way obsolete warships are sealed up with that foam stuff, Sweeney discovered. “Why, the smog looks as if you could cut it and eat it!” He started to open the window, meaning to get a whiff of the yellowish vapor.

  “Stop that!” the Archvicar told him. “We don’t know what might happen if that mist should come into this room; nothing like it ever has drifted up from the Fettinch Moss before. If it’s of Apollinax’s conjuring, we’ll not like it in our lungs. If it’s some sort of psychic barrier, an insubstantial illusion-why, there’s nothing to be gained by playing with it. Draw the draperies, Sweeney, for almost no sunlight’s coming through, and we’ll exchange information without the worry of that nasty cloud just beyond the panes.”

  By gaslight, in a semicircle about the gas fire, the six of them considered their circumstances. There must be an aco
lyte or two on guard outside the door, but they spoke low, and the door was so ponderous that it would have been difficult to hear a shout through it. Under a desk, the baby slept on the thick carpet.

  Fresca, the most impatient and edgy of them all, went to the heart of things. “Manfredo, what hope do we have?”

  “My darling and delight, permit me to summarize, in the manner of a field commander, our weaknesses and our strengths.” The Archvicar produced a cheroot; apparently thought better of it, the closeness of the Muniment Room considered; returned it to its case. “Ours is much the weaker force. We are outnumbered four to one. The enemy is well armed; we have merely one stiletto, Pomegranate, and that to be drawn only in extremis. We are imprisoned in a fairly comfortable dungeon; the enemy’s movements are unrestricted. We have no prospect of reinforcements; indeed, for all we know, that seeming fog outside may confine us to one of those hypothetical ‘time capsules.’ We labor under the handicap of certain scruples as to violent action; the enemy is not so inhibited.

  “Now were this all-well, I’ve surmounted heavy odds before now, and there are ways by which Phlebas and Sweeney and I might get ourselves other men’s gear, though that would be a chancy business.

  “But it is not all. We contend against not mere flesh and blood, but against dominations and powers. Apollinax is a master of unsympathetic magic. He has laid his plans with care. Already he seems to have drawn to this house uncanny presences and influences. We do not know how far his powers extend. Our only means of resistance against those powers is prayer-at which the male members of our party are rusty. Need I dishearten us more than I have already?”

  Marina’s head ached tremendously. “Haven’t we any hope at all?” she wanted to know. “Do people end this way, sitting, waiting to be... to have things done to them, not even begging, not even screaming?”

  “Too many have ended that way, Marina, in this enlightened century of ours. But I prefer bangs to whimpers: if we’re to be snuffed out, the snuffers will suffer burnt fingers.” The Archvicar snapped his own fingers. “Let me proceed to recount our advantages.

  “First, Apollinax doesn’t know who I am, nor who Madame and Fresca and Phlebas are: he takes us for his tools-instruments in part unwilling, but sufficiently pliable. He fancies that I’m an evil old cripple, his dupe. I am something other than that.

  “Second, I suspect that he overestimates his own powers, large though they may be. He calls up spirits from the vasty deep; but will those spirits do his bidding obsequiously?

  “Third, he doesn’t know the Weem so well as I do; nor this house so well as I know it.

  “Fourth, his dosing of disciples and acolytes with kalanzi reduces their effectiveness as instruments; while the six of us here have our wits sharpened by peril.

  “Fifth, he has opened the portals of Time and Death; but who knows what spirits, unwanted by him, may drift through that invisible gateway and work upon us all?”

  Sweeney was not much heartened by this discourse. “Archvicar, I’m with you in anything you want to do. If you’ve got a plan, let us hear it; they might not wait till ten o’clock to drag us out of here.”

  “There is a scheme, my friends, though it may frighten you; but I doubt if any of you has thought of a better. My scheme requires that all of us act as if victory were possible, keeping our heads clear, obeying orders precisely and promptly, and putting terror out of mind by a strong exercise of will-quite as pain can be put out of mind, if the will is disciplined. One thing especially for you, Marina: you must let Fresca carry your Michael, for his sake, since she will be freer to act.

  “We shall offer no resistance when they come to take us out of this room. We shall go down to the chapel in our robes, and later down to the Weem. We shall submit to the first indignities of their ritual. But when the test comes...” He whispered; he repeated the details several times; he required all five of them to repeat precisely the instructions they had received. There was no alternative course of action.

  This scheme gave Sweeney the hoo-ha’s all over again. Was there no other way really, no other way at all? Knock, knock, knock. Perhaps Apollinax wouldn’t really do what they expected him to do; perhaps he’d suffer from a failure of nerve. Yeah, keep telling yourself that, Apeneck Sweeney, though it’s a lie.

  “How do we know all these directions and measurements are correct,” Sweeney complained, “if a crazy man wrote them down-even if he was your father?”

  The Archvicar and Sweeney had before them on the desk a mass of charts, calculations, and jottings, taken out of the Muniment Room vault by the Archvicar. They were talking in whispers. The three women were curled in chairs, trying to sleep, or at least to rest, strength being needed for that night; Phlebas and the baby slept the slumber of the just.

  “By three tests,” the Archvicar assured him. “First, Balgrummo’s calculations have been accurate, so far as we have explored the Weem; that’s how I contrived to take us in and bring us out last night and this morning. Second, Balgrummo was mad only west-northwest: where his passion for penetrating the Weem was concerned, he was systematic, meticulous-otherwise he wouldn’t have come back out from underground. Third, there has been something like communication between us.”

  Sweeney looked warily at the Archvicar. Was this adventurer madder than Apollinax? He said slowly and carefully, trying not to offend, “Communication with a man who’s been dead for three years?”

  “Ah, Sweeney, I don’t mean a tête-è-tête, or even a second dream like my vision of being with a middle-aged Balgrummo in his study, a few nights ago. How can I explain? Do you understand that the Lodging is permeated, saturated, by Lord Balgrummo’s presence-that he was everywhere here while living, and is everywhere here while dead? He hasn’t departed: his essence is confined here, impalpable, voiceless, suffering. The Fraulein had one experience of that presence, our Marina another. In some degree, this essence or vestige of Balgrummo seems aware that we are here in his house.

  “By ‘communication’ I mean something like a faint telepathy, a consciousness of deep crying unto deep. He and I are joined by blood, by character, by memory. No one but I, among the living, might hear with understanding any whisper from his depths: de profundis clamavi ad te. He calls to me across the great gulf of Time, asking forgiveness for his sins of commission; I call back, in emotion, asking his forgiveness for my sins of omission toward him. There are no words, you must understand: words are tools, not thoughts or emotions. What I experience in this strange mode is an intuition, an intimation of a secret compact, if you will.

  “He knows my plight, and I his, though he lingers sightless, speechless, discarnate, raging in his impotence. He senses, I believe, that I am here again, after many decades of absence; I sense that he has been here always, and that he begins to stir, needing only energy from some source to become palpable. Apollinax has told me to evoke Balgrummo’s shade; well, my presence in this house is sufficient in itself to provoke psychic disturbances which may become physical disturbances. For energy, invisible, flows from one pole to another: he and I are poles in this haunted house, one of those rare places where things inexplicable can occur century upon century.”

  Sweeney saw tears forming in this sardonic man’s eyes. Once or twice the Archvicar’s voice had cracked slightly.

  The Archvicar contrived a faint smile. “To employ your vocabulary, Sweeney, doubtless you think me ‘nutty as a fruitcake.’ I confess to a streak of madness, even blood-madness, my father’s legacy to me. Yet it’s a madness kept bound nearly all the time, and a madness that doesn’t impair my rational faculties in the ordinary concerns of life. You’re conversing with a man whom the world sees, rightly enough, as shrewd, practical, calculating, bent on the main chance: no lunatic, I assure you.

  “Well, then: there subsists between Balgrummo and me an unspoken awareness, and a kind of bargain-a compact not in words, but in feeling. Let me put it this way: from across the gulf of Time, either says to the other, ‘What I may do
for you, that I will.’ And in some manner I know, ‘in erring reason’s spite,’ that what Balgrummo’s charts and Balgrummo’s notes tell me is quite true. An essence signals to an essence, ‘Believe me!’ Do you understand at all, Sweeney? ‘I got to use words when I talk to you.’”

  Sweeney had no notion of what to reply: all this was beyond him, and only a few days ago he would have dismissed it as rubbish. He could not so dismiss it now, but neither could he apprehend it.

  “Well, well,” said the Archvicar, more calmly, “let that pass, Sweeney; my first two explanations will stand by themselves. So far as Balgrummo’s written clues can be decoded, and so far as they extend, we may rely upon them. They are all we have, and our only chance now.”

  Sweeney could see that well enough. “But Balgrummo never got through to the other side, if I’ve understood you.”

  “No: but he came near to that, very near. The last notation in the irregular coded journal he kept is this:

  “‘Five to ten feet, probably no more. Bad chill. Cannot work until better. Another day’s work, and it might have been. Trapped at the last?’

  “That notation is six years old, Sweeney, only six years. For the final three years of his life, Balgrummo was bedridden. There’s pathos for you: so many years of incredible striving, incredible toil, and ‘trapped at the last?’

  “At first, of course, those years of jottings were made for his own systematic reference and guidance. But toward the end, he couldn’t have needed to record his progress: he knew all the secrets of the Weem. In a symbolic way, he had been working out his salvation with diligence, and was baffled at the moment when he seemed about to win through. So for whom did he leave the later notes? For whom but his son? Did Balgrummo sense, occultly, that I would be drawn back here?”