Lord of the Hollow Dark

by Russell Kirk

  She was at once frightened and fascinated. “Can we get down to it?”

  “No one has been down there, my dear, since time out of mind-not since the Third Laird’s day, it’s thought. Yet...” He seemed to think better of what he had been about to say. “However that may be, we cannot be sure the Weem still exists: the roof may have fallen in, or it may be drowned in water.”

  The Archvicar raised his heavy white eyebrows at Madame Sesostris, owl-like. “Can you bear the telling of the story all over again, Grizel? You’re kind. It’s a pity that Black Beauty here, our maid, so affectionately holding your baby, can’t follow my lecture. For she comes from Girgenti, in Sicily, which has its own labyrinth under the city, older than Hellas. What was, or is, under Balgrummo Lodging can’t be so wondrous as that Girgenti maze, but it’s strange enough, and as eerie. Isn’t she handsome, our Sicilian handmaid, our glossy pomegranate of a girl, Sikel and Greek and Roman and Norman and Saracen all blended in her hot blood? If only she were half so clever as she is faithful-but we mustn’t reproach her, must we, when the luscious Pomegranate soothes your baby so artfully?”

  The Sicilian charmer in her ugly clothes, gently rocking the baby in her round arms, watched her master, guessing perhaps that he talked of her approvingly, her black eyes alert for any command. Marina curled her arms round her knees-the wind was coming chill down the Den now-to listen to this old man whose voice, when he wished, was like a long caress.

  “When the Picts were here,” he went on, “they knew the Weem under that mound; and their carved stones, fetched up from below in medieval times and tossed into a kitchen midden, long lay in the policies here. They are in the Queen Street Museum now, gifted by the ninth Baron Balgrummo. What did those dawn-folk worship in the Weem? Did they seek to know the future? People go underground for such forbidden knowledge, as at the cave of Trophonius in Greece, and sometimes they learn more than they had desired to know. Our fine-eyed Sicilian pomegranate here, could you understand her, might tell you of the subterranean temple of the chthonian deities, beneath old Girgenti. Isn’t she shapely, the wild thing, sun-ripened?”

  “Archvicar!” Madame Sesostris murmured.

  “But I digress, however understandably.” The Archvicar turned up the collar of his coat against the wind. “The Romans,” he resumed, “found the Weem during their occupation here-they had a permanent camp not far distant from this spot-and it seems possible that the legionaries established a temple of Mithra there below, Mithra’s fanes always being below ground; Roman inscriptions were found in the Weem by the Third Laird, when his miners made a way into it for him. Or did the Romans take the Weem for a portal to Avernus, where no birds sing? They all went their way to dusty death.

  “Some time in the Dark Ages, darkest of all here in Caledonia, Celtic Christians penetrated to the Weem and made of it a Holy Cave, having for baptismal font a flowing natural Holy Well. They left a splendid symbolically-carved sarcophagus down there in the darkness, and lesser tombs, and perhaps enlarged the place. A Celtic saint, called Nectan—probably no kin to the Pictish king of that name—is supposed to have worked miracles in the Holy Cave, so that thereafter it was called Nectan’s Weem. When was that? Why, about the sixth century, I suppose. Like a Desert Father, Nectan had infernal or purgatorial visions in his cave.

  “After the Synod of Whitby, and the triumph of Latin Christianity in Scotland, Nectan’s Weem seems to have fallen into disuse: it may have been suspected of being more pagan than Christian. Near the Weem or over it, the military monks of the Temple built a commandery rather late in the history of their order. It is thought that they made a chapel of the cave, and the rumor spread, near the dissolution of the Temple, that the Templars worshipped a head or skull far below the earth.”

  “Ugh!” Marina shuddered. “Whose head?”

  The Archvicar gestured soothingly. “I suspect that it must have been the skull of that old obscure Saint Nectan, poor half-forgotten Pict, perhaps ornamented reverently with gold and silver, and venerated as a holy relic; but some alleged that it was the mummified head of a grand master of the Temple, worshipped rather than venerated, and invoked to prophesy. There’s no way now of learning the truth of the matter, I suppose: for the Templars were dispossessed and dispersed, and their lands passed to a little contemplative order, or sub-order, of monks less militant, called locally the Weem Fathers. Or, to speak more accurately, this site and the hills back of it and the mosses below it passed to the contemplatives; the crown took for itself the more arable lands of the Temple.”

  “Lei!” said the black-haired maid to the Archvicar, laying her long fingers on his arm. “Lei!” She was pointing upward to the brae above the northern cliffs of the Den.

  Someone was walking there, Marina made out-a man with a rucksack on his back, it seemed. He was distant and dim, but he picked his way along the very lip of the quarrylike wall, as if seeking a path downward. The Archvicar was saying something in Italian to the Sicilian pomegranate.

  “I do believe that man means to join us,” Madame Sesostris observed.

  “He sha’n’t.” The Archvicar struggled up to observe the walker. “These eyes of mine! I see nobody at all. But you may be sure that he’ll not find a way down. One reason why Apollinax chose the Lodging for this conference is that nobody can enter the policies, or leave them, except through the pend.”

  “Doesn’t anybody ever come down from those hills?” They were so near to a great city, Marina thought, and yet so cut off from everything distracting and disturbing.

  The Archvicar had settled himself back upon the bench. “Two burglars-or miners given to burgling when unemployed—came down perhaps twenty years ago, in the last Lord’s time. They knew something of rock-climbing, and used ropes, leaving a confederate up near the waterfall.”

  “What a dangerous thing to do!” Marina imagined herself dangling on one of those cliffs by the waterfall. The man with the rucksack, she noticed, had vanished from sight; probably he had given up the foolish notion of descending into the Den.

  “So they found, I believe,” said the Archvicar. “They never were seen again.”

  “Never seen again? Do you mean that they fell and were killed?”

  “There were no bodies found anywhere in the Lodging or the policies,” the Archvicar explained, “but the burglars never returned to their ropes. Their confederate heard someone-not his friends-laughing down below in the Den, and ran away. Later he told the police about their disappearance, saying his friends had been only ‘having a look round.’”

  “Could they have fallen into this little river?”

  “The official theory was that they must have got over that tremendous ashlar dyke, some distance from the pend-one side or the other from it. But if they did clamber over the dyke somewhere, why did they never return to their wives or even their favorite pub?”

  “You know so much about this house, Archvicar!”

  “I was often here when I was a young man, a university student,” the Archvicar offered, blandly. “Now let me see: what was I telling you about Scots history before that hill-walker diverted us?”

  “About the contemplative monks who succeeded the Templars here, those Weem Fathers.”

  “Ah, quite. I wasn’t boring you? Well, then, the monks patched up the Templars’ buildings, and enlarged them-that massive tower above the northern portion of the Lodging is said to be the chief remnant of the Templars’ work-and established the Priory of Saint Nectan. Rather quietly, they revived the old Celtic cult of that holy man from the shadowy beginning of things. Beneath the Priory, it became known, was the Weem in which the half-forgotten Nectan had glimpsed Purgatory. Or was it quite what we would call Purgatory? The medieval line of demarcation between Purgatory and Hell was ill-defined. And many Scots seem to have believed that just above Hell lay the Kingdom of the Fairies-which every seven years must pay its teinds to Hell. Rather discreetly, the monks let it be understood that others possibly might behold in the Weem what
Nectan had beheld. Indeed, there might be visions of one’s future at the foot of the splendid carven stair, six ells broad, which led into the Weem. It was all rather like the better-known Purgatory of the famous Saint Patrick, at Lough Derg, in Ireland.”

  “That sounds so long, long ago!”

  “It was, my dear young lady. To what did those monks, and those pilgrims who came, pray in the Weem? Although medieval belief was collapsing throughout Europe; though even the arm-bone and finger-bones of Saint Andrew the Apostle at St. Andrew’s Cathedral no longer drew miracle-seekers-why, all the same the closemouthed monks of the Purgatory of Saint Nectan still welcomed pilgrims who went down into the living rock. One of the marks of a decadent age is superstition, Marina.”

  “What did they hope for, Archvicar?”

  He looked at Marina fixedly. “What Apollinax’s disciples and acolytes are seeking, I suppose: glimpses of another realm of being, prospects of their future state.” He flung the stump of his cheroot into the shrubbery. “When an orthodoxy decays, the old dark gods, the savage gods, win back their burnt offerings.” The Archvicar paused for some moments, as if brooding.

  “Do we know what they actually saw down there?” Marina prompted.

  “The prior instructed them not to wander far from the first large chamber of the Weem,” he resumed. “I gleaned something from a rare early pamphlet I encountered once. Some pilgrims found ‘sancts’ below. One visitor described the unspeakable tortures-unspeakable for us, that is, not for him-of lost souls in the abyss beyond the Weem itself. Another pilgrim lamented at length, and vividly, the advances of the tempters, and especially the temptresses, who had plagued him below stairs in the Purgatory. Several, it seems, were appalled by ‘rushing Styx,’ presumably a fierce underground river. Others were most moved by incredible sounds, the shrieking and wailing and pounding and chanting of the lost, condemned to dance forever and a day to devils’ tunes. One is reminded of the second book of Paradise Lost:

  ‘At length a universal hubbub wild

  Of stunning sounds and voices all confus’d,

  Borne through the hollow dark, assaults his ear

  With loudest vehemence: thither he plies,

  Undaunted to meet there whatever Pow’r

  Or Spirit of the nethermost abyss

  Might in that noise reside,...’”

  Marina felt that she had turned pale, but the Archvicar did not appear to notice.

  “It was rumored that some of the pilgrims did not ascend again,” he added, “rather like that brace of burglars twenty years ago. Oh, it was not quite the Bight of Benin, where ‘few come out though many go in,’ but the kith and kin of some pilgrims did not behold them after. One old man was said to have died of fright in the Weem, and a crippled veteran of the wars to have tumbled into a pit from which he could not be extricated. By the year 1500, the archbishop of St. Andrew’s, primate of Scotland, on urgent inquiry from the pope, had become uneasy enough to order that the Purgatory be destroyed. Whether or not much damage was wreaked within, certainly the broad stair was blocked up in that year.

  “Did the place remain altogether sealed? Possibly not. At any rate, about the beginning of the Reformation in Scotland it was declared by Knox’s people that uncanny things were occurring at the Priory of St. Nectan. These rumors were used to justify the suppression of Saint Nectan’s cult, and a lay commendator was appointed for the Priory.

  “This commendator of ecclesiastical property-not a very profitable holding, this, once the pilgrims ceased to come-was a hardfisted bonnet laird out of Carrick, good at need, reputed zealous in the Reformed cause. His father had been a tall man of low degree who in the troubles of the time had secured for himself, perhaps by violence, a Carrick farm called Balgrummo. This second Laird of Balgrummo, now master of the sinister Priory as well-John Inchburn was his name-soon drove out the few remaining monks and called his new holding Balgrummo Lodging. Mary of Guise unseated him and made a priest the commendator. But when Mary the Regent died besieged at Leith, John Inchburn of Balgrummo swaggered back into possession. ‘They shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who can.’ The place has been Balgrummo Lodging ever since.”

  “It’s so confusing!”

  “Like all Scots history, my dear-a long chronicle of ambition and feud, with little discernible pattern in it. The Second Laird did not long survive his triumph, so that the Carrick property and the Lodging passed to his son, David Inchburn, also a man of blood, who had ridden for a time with the Lords of the Congregation, and had fallen in and out of friendship with Kirkcaldy of Grange, Maitland of Lethington, and other mercurial worthies of the time. Like his grandfather and father, the Third Laird was good at need.”

  “Was the Third Laird a Catholic or a Protestant?”

  “David Inchburn of Balgrummo fought for his own hand. There was little money to be had out of either his property in the west or his property in the east, so he sought his fortune in the Continent, like many another Scots captain, and was said to have found it.

  “The Third Laird returned to Scotland during the regency of the Earl of Morton. Inchburn’s old friendships with Grange and Lethington, Mary Stuart’s last champions, made him suspect to the Regent. Also rumor had it that the Third Laird had brought back from the Germanys a whole ship’s cargo of silver, and besides that a beautiful witch or succubus, and her father who could transmute base metals into precious.”

  “I love stories about wizards and witches!” Marina said. “So long as they don’t come true, Marina?” Madame Sesostris asked softly.

  “Don’t disquiet the girl, Grizel. Well, Morton, the wickedest man of a wicked time in Scotland, had clever ways of ridding himself of enemies by bringing them to trial for witchcraft-and enriching himself in the process. He denounced Inchburn of Balgrummo, and the same day rode out of Edinburgh with a strong force, to take the Third Laird in his sins at the Lodging.”

  The Archvicar rose to stretch himself. Madame had fallen asleep on her bench, but the Sicilian girl was watching the Archvicar almost as if she could understand. “I must be boring you with these legends of old bones.”

  “Oh, no, Archvicar; please tell me the rest!”

  “Very well; there’s time enough before lunch.” He sat down again. “The Earl of Morton was after Inchburn’s supposed silver, meaning to take it all as he had taken other men’s. But a principal pretext was the accusation against the Laird of Balgrummo that ‘beneath hys lodging lies ane low sellair whar Inchburn doth keep and cherish ane monstrous Head of ane soldyer Monk frae auld lang syne wha he and hys company do worshipp.’”

  “Mightn’t the Laird and his lady and her father have been venerating the skull of Saint Nectan, and nothing more than that?” Marina asked.

  “Possibly; but by 1578, even the veneration of relics was criminal in Scotland. Moreover, the lady’s father had died a few days before Morton’s march on the Lodging, and it was charged that he had perished in an occult experiment. Unquestionably the Third Laird, assisted by his Bohemian alchemist, had contrived to open a way into the old Purgatory. When the Third Laird entered that dread place-why, did he find lost and dead pilgrims in the depths? And what else may he have found? Did some power draw him down, so to speak?”

  Despite her dread, Marina could not stop herself from asking, “You said that the Third Laird, the one you called the Warlock, died under the house. How was that?”

  “The fight itself was interesting, but I must spare you most of the details, my dear Marina. You can find little about the whole affair in the standard histories, Lang’s included, for Morton had plundered and destroyed grander folk than the Inchburns of Balgrummo. David Inchburn had done high deeds in the Germanys, but in his own house he was unprepared for this sudden assault, from front and back at once. Some of Morton’s men came down from the den head, as I mentioned, and the Laird’s people were too few to hold the Lodging-which, after all, had been a priory, not a castle-against a better-armed and bigger force headed by
the Regent himself, storming both entrances.

  “For all that, the resistance must have been far sharper than Morton had expected. Balgrummo had at the Lodging a few companions from the wars, and below stairs somewhere a considerable body of miners-Scots miners and salters were serfs then and for long later-who came swarming out of the depths like so many ghostly Picts, swinging mattocks in the Laird’s cause. There seems to have been a desperate defense. A long timbered gallery ran along the front then, and Balgrummo’s veterans fired from it, but the Regent’s soldiers had more guns. The woman from Bohemia-wife, mistress, or succubus-was struck by a bullet from an arquebus. At that, the Laird and most of the men left to him, carrying the lady, fled down into the Weem.

  “When Morton’s men tried to follow them into the abyss-one gathers that the victors had difficulty in finding the way down-Inchburn lit a train of powder that destroyed the entrance, brought down much of the vaulting and masses of the native rock, and entombed himself, the woman, and his men. They never emerged.”

  Marina stared wide-eyed at the Archvicar. “They’re still down below? That man and that woman I saw in the painting?”

  “Bones lie under cellars in many old houses, Marina. Their bones may be in the Weem still, if the Purgatory still exists down there. And who knows what else might be found in those caves or halls?” The Archvicar touched a match to another cheroot. “The Laird’s silver, if ever it existed, was not discovered in the Lodging. Morton raged, but the very approach to the underground chambers was so blocked, and so dangerous to tamper with lest the whole Lodging fall in upon it, that he could not mine to seek out his enemy and his enemy’s treasure. Besides, Morton’s own men looked blackly mutinous on being told that they must crawl down into the dark Weem to fight with desperate warlocks and confront long-dead ‘sancts.’