Lord of the Hollow Dark

by Russell Kirk

  “I suppose that I shouldn’t have mentioned my old name. I forgot that I’m to be Marina and you’re to be Coriolan, though you reminded me a little while ago. I’m sorry.” Why was he staring so?

  “Your father is General Percy Fitzgerald, with a place in Lincolnshire?”

  “Yes. Why, did you know him?”

  There came a silence. Then Coriolan said, “I served under him in Africa. How does General Fitzgerald do?”

  “Didn’t you hear? He died more than two years ago, after years of being sick.”

  “I hadn’t known, Deborah Fitzgerald. I wander, you understand, and there’s much that passes me by. You’re quite alone now?”

  “Except for dear Michael here.”

  “Possibly that’s why I was drawn here.” Coriolan stood still as a statue, a ragged statue.

  What did he mean? And who had said to her, recently, that there are no coincidences?

  Coriolan seemed lost in reverie; he shook his head as if to clear his wits, then took her hand and placed it between his big, hard, scratched hands. “Like the Inchburns, Deborah Fitzgerald, I can be good at need-though it’s their family motto, not mine. No one did more for me than your father. Well, then, it’s Deborah and Ralph Bain in this room, Marina and Coriolan elsewhere. If I can serve you, send for me below stairs. Good night, Deborah.”

  She hurried over to watch him descend the hidden stair; but before she could get her head round the corner, he had vanished silently. Where had he been all her life, and where would he go?

  12

  The Demon-God of the Weem

  The huge face, more leonine than human but not merely bestial, stared at them from the low bronze door, barring passage into the Weem. A serpent hung over the creature’s forehead, as if about to crawl between this being’s fangs into his mouth. This hideous relief was admirably executed in bronze, and ancient.

  “The medieval pilgrims will have taken this thing for a demon,” the Archvicar said, “but actually this is a representation of a god: Kronos, Lord of Time-or rather, Time himself, Father Time, giver of life, giver of death. This bronze panel seems to be classical work, riveted to a later bronze door. Though standing subject to correction, I think it’s Mithraic. Was the Weem made into a Mithraeum late in the second century, perhaps? The ninth Lord Balgrummo thought so, from scanty evidences; this face would have convinced him, had he ever got down here. How did the panel come here? Was it left by Roman legionaries, votaries of Mithra? Kronos was great in the Mithraic pantheon. Or did Picts fetch the panel back from some raid south of Hadrian’s Wall? We’ll never know. Well, presently we must see whether old Kronos will consent to let us enter the Weem-or to leave it, once inside.”

  “I’d just as soon he said no to the first question,” Sweeney muttered.

  Sweeney, Coriolan, and the Archvicar stood in the smashed vestibule of Saint Nectan’s Weem, cluttered with blocks of stone fallen from its vaulted ceiling. They confronted a wall of rock, neatly quarried to smoothness, but with cracks and pits from some great explosion upon its face. Sweeney’s poor head still ached badly, and his stomach too, despite his having slept until noon. It had been a piece of luck that Apollinax hadn’t come below stairs for a second inspection of their labors, while Sweeney had been sleeping off the kalanzi and the drubbing he had taken from the Archvicar and the Sicilian girl. A stick-on bandage ran across Sweeney’s slashed eyebrows; that could be explained away to Apollinax, should he inquire, as a bad rock cut. Sick though he felt, Sweeney had been pressed back into service by the pseudo-Archvicar, Manfred Arcane, as hard a master as Apollinax himself. Had Sweeney exchanged King Log for King Stork? Yet be thankful for small favors, Sweeney: this bronze door to the Weem was locked, so for the present, at least, he’d not be thrust into the dead abyss beyond. The ghastly bronze face of this demon or god, with the serpent about to enter into him, was sufficient in itself to give Sweeney the D.T.’s.

  Despite Gerontion’s protestations of debility, Apollinax had sent the Archvicar into the underground workings this afternoon. Phlebas had assisted him down the ladder and through the tunnel from the drain to the vestibule. The Archvicar had been commanded to devise a way of opening the small bronze door: they must be within the Weem by tomorrow, Wednesday.

  The three of them were alone in this perilous stone antechamber or vestibule: the acolyte-boys, being of no help at present, had been sent back upstairs to participate in a certain drill directed by Apollinax. Phlebas kept watch in the tunnel from the drain, to make sure that no one should come upon them suddenly. Coriolan and Sweeney still were to address Arcane as “Archvicar,” pretending that he was the old poisoner who had been called Gerontion; for if Apollinax should learn of the deception, everything would fall apart.

  “I don’t know much of such matters,” Coriolan was saying, “but surely that keyhole and lock can’t be Roman.”

  The marvelous bronze door was recessed nearly two feet into massive gray sandstone, and apparently the door opened inward upon the Weem. It would have been ferocious labor to try to break away the rock which surrounded the door-and highly dangerous, for the shattered vaulting of the ruined vestibule hung above their heads like the sword of Damocles, and vibrations alone might bring the stones down upon them. Yet this ancient door, which had no handle, would not yield-not even quiver when they thrust against it. At the right-hand side of the door was a large keyhole, with no way of getting at the bolt beyond.

  “That lock is sixteenth-century work,” the Archvicar answered, “probably German: a masterpiece of its kind. Who fitted it to the door? Perhaps that Bohemian alchemist, the father of the Third Laird’s mistress or wife-the man who seems to have been destroyed in an explosion down here, a few days before Morton stormed the Lodging. If we had acetylene torches, which we don’t, we might try to cut through the metal around the lock; but Apollinax believes this bronze panel of Kronos to be bound up with the mysteries of the Weem, and he doesn’t mean to have the genius of the place disturbed, if it can be helped.”

  Sweeney had shown the door to Apollinax the previous day, when Apollinax had come down for his first tour of inspection. The Master had seemed intensely happy at the sight of the strange leonine face upon the panel-happy for the first time since Sweeney had known him. “Kronos, who devours all things!” he had murmured. “The Lord of empty eternity, where nothing stays, nothing vanishes! I knew I had sought out the right place.”

  He had ordered the Archvicar to see that the door be opened this day: when the Master decreed a thing, that thing must be done in the appointed time. Sweeney wondered why the Archvicar did not seem more urgently concerned about the problem of the door.

  “We might try to make a wax impression of the lock,” Sweeney offered, “but we haven’t any way of casting a key.” If a locksmith should have to be brought from Edinburgh, he reflected, there would be some chance for sending word to the police that things were wrong at the Lodging—some faint chance.

  “There may be no need for anything of that sort,” the Archvicar answered him. “I have seen the key that we need, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “What, lying about in an odd corner, a key four hundred years old?” Coriolan asked.

  “Not an odd corner, my friend: I came upon the thing at the bottom of a very secret hidie-hole, containing old charts, in Lord Balgrummo’s study at the top of the tower-and left it there, not knowing then what it was meant to open. But the key I found is modern: Balgrummo must have encountered our present difficulty when he came upon this door, and had a key made-taking the lock’s impression himself, of course, he not wanting any pawky Edinburgh tradesman down here.”

  “Alec Balgrummo had talent for everything under sun or moon,” Coriolan observed, “or so my father used to say. Will you send up for the key now?”

  “By no means.” The Archvicar seated himself upon the lowest step of the broad Pilgrims’ Stair, the foot of which protruded from masses of rubble brought down by the Warlock Laird’s gunpowder; higher up, t
he Stair must be blocked even more thoroughly by whatever had been done to seal it in 1500. “I don’t wish anyone but myself to pry into Balgrummo’s study. Besides, we require some time to hatch plots. Apollinax will take it that we’re busying ourselves with the lock; meanwhile, we three mice will play.”

  In this relative security underground, Arcane had discarded his pretense of infirmity: undisguised, the Archvicar was a vigorous, erect man, sinewy, as Sweeney had learned to his cost. Also Arcane had dropped the chi-chi tone from his speech. What an actor he had been, all this while in the Lodging!

  Sweeney knew who Manfred Arcane was, although he never had set eyes on him in Hamnegri. The natives in Haggat sometimes had called Arcane “the Father of Shadows.” His formal title was “Minister without Portfolio to the Hereditary President of Hamnegri”; but de facto Arcane was commander of the President-Sultan’s mercenary troops, and also had charge of Hamnegri’s diplomatic relations and oil-contract negotiations. He had other functions, too-among them, magisterial jurisdiction in cases of appeal by foreigners from decisions by Hamnegrian courts. It may have been this latter function that had put Arcane on to that old toad Gerontion’s operations.

  But why Arcane had impersonated Archvicar Gerontion and troubled himself to travel all the way to Balgrummo Lodging, Sweeney had only a foggy notion. In Marina’s room, last night, the pseudo-Archvicar had given Sweeney a brief sketch of his purposes. He had bullied Sweeney ruthlessly; had exhorted him, too; had made him large promises of redemption—not Apollinax’s kind of redemption—if he would pull himself together and work with them for their common salvation here at the Lodging. Sweeney had surrendered unconditionally, promising amendment: this was his only chance for escape from Apollinax, and if anybody could give a fellow a hand up, this Manfred Arcane could.

  It was Arcane who, as gray eminence, had crushed the Marxist revolt in Hamnegri, ten years ago. No one knew much about Arcane, except that he was rich, powerful, and seemingly omniscient. It wasn’t even sure whether Arcane was a European or some sort of North African. This Father of Shadows, it was said, had come to Hamnegri at the President-Sultan’s invitation, not long after the French colonial administration had ceased. One journalist of the Left had called Arcane “the most dangerous man in Africa.” Almost never had he been seen in public. Yet here he was in this frightful cave, lighting a cheroot, this fabulous figure from Africa, this deadly man who had held a knife to Sweeney’s throat last night!

  Coriolan was speaking. “Meanwhile, how does the Master busy himself? I’ve seen him only twice since I fell in here, and he wasn’t cordial at those encounters.” Coriolan had sat down upon a great stone fallen from the vaulting overhead. “I suspect that he doesn’t know what to make of me.”

  He’s not the only one, Sweeney thought. Somehow this man in the kilt still seemed-well, preternatural. But without Coriolan’s skill and strength, it would have been impossible to have progressed this far in the underground work; for that matter, Sweeney knew that he might be lying dead now under fallen rocks, if it hadn’t been for Coriolan’s instant help on two occasions at least. Sweeney reflected that he didn’t have a real friend in the world. This Coriolan, or Bain, for all his oddities, could be a friend worth cultivating: tough, humorous, knowledgeable, “good at need”—to borrow the Inchburns’ motto.

  The Archvicar was replying to Coriolan: “Our Master is raising his voice on high, leading his chorus.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He has the disciples and the acolytes-all but two of them at the pend, Sweeney-in the chapel, teaching them the chants that will be sung at the ritual tomorrow night, and imparting to them information which is not for such ears as ours. The exercise seems congenial for him, Apollinax having been a priest once.”

  “Rather a musty place for devotions, that chapel?” Coriolan raised his bushy eyebrows inquiringly.

  “Musty, dusty, rotten, my friends. A day or two after the last Balgrummo’s death, the trustees had the chapel doors screwed up; no one entered until Apollinax had the screws taken out, three days ago. The room must be riddled by dry rot, woodworm, deathwatch beetle. It has been disused, for that matter, ever since Balgrummo’s Trouble in 1913. There was minor fire damage on that occasion: some of the seven-branched candlesticks were upset in the confusion, caught the draperies, and singed the walls. It’s not a spot I should choose for devotions—or for anything else. Some say that old emotions can be embedded in stones. If that chapel’s stones were to cry out, the bravest man in the world would run from the room.”

  “My father said much the same thing,” Coriolan interjected. “Never saw it myself. The old monks’ chapel, was it?”

  “Yes, once; but in James II’s time all the Gothic was covered over with baroque pomp and circumstance, and a great circular painting set in the ceiling—trompe l’oeil, Saul and the Witch of Endor and Samuel’s ghost, the Witch’s skinny arm and hand stretching forth from the frame, Samuel’s shade seeming to emerge from the plaster, convincing enough to scare a small boy witless if he should stray in. Then, in the last Lord’s time, there was installed as a reredos an enormous cartoon by Fuseli, or more likely some pupil of Fuseli; presumably it’s still there, but carefully covered, as indeed it was in the last Lord’s time. It’s a Golgotha, I understand, but really an inversion of the symbols, an ultimate sacrilege; but enough of that for now.”

  Sweeney marveled that the Archvicar and Coriolan could ramble on about the decorative arts, here in this dungeon which might collapse upon them any moment, here in this uncanny house with a lunatic leading his dupes in song somewhere overhead. “What in hell has that got to do with the mess we’re in?” he demanded.

  Immediately he regretted having spoken in that tone, knowing now just how summary the pseudo-Archvicar could be in his reprisals, when he chose. But his new master did not seem annoyed. “In hell, Apeneck, a great deal. I’d best paint the background for you, because we contend against powers and dominations, and you need to understand. Coriolan may have something to contribute. You needn’t fret: Apollinax and his angelic choir will divert themselves in the profaned chapel for at least another hour. Bear with me: I’ll tell you something about Alexander Fillan Inchburn, tenth and last Baron Balgrummo.”

  “Quite the last?” Coriolan said that with a faint smile.

  “Quite the last, a bend sinister still being an insuperable obstacle to succession to a peerage, barring resurrection of an extinct title by Crown in Parliament. And what son born on the wrong side of a blanket would seek to be ennobled so, the peculiar blemish on this title considered?” The Archvicar seemed bland as ever. “No other inquiries? Very well, I give you my tale of a family’s ruin, even though ‘at my back in a cold blast I hear, the rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.’”

  The Archvicar paused; looked across the vestibule at the monstrous face in bronze on the little door to the Weem; meditated for what seemed to Sweeney an interminable while; then began in his melodious voice.

  “Alexander Fillan Inchburn, who succeeded to his peerage when young, came of a line of masterful men whose considerable intellectual endowments had been subordinated, perhaps fortunately, to their adventurous impulses. From the first Laird of Balgrummo onward, the Inchburns had been soldiers of ability, several of them in the service of foreign princes. Three of them in the eighteenth century, after being partially disabled by wounds or perhaps tiring of the camp, became nabobs-two East Indian variety, one West Indian. Being shrewd Scots, with an eye to the main chance, they did very well indeed out of both war and commerce. A propensity to gaming and grandiose undertakings, nevertheless, might have undone the family, had it not been for the wealth extracted from the Balgrummo Pits.

  “For in the hills which you see to the back of the Lodging lay some of the richest coal deposits of Scotland. The mining of coal-or ‘coles,’ as people said then-commenced in these lands before the middle of the sixteenth century, when the monks still held this property. In the beginn
ing, the colliers dug principally in the near vicinity of this house-just above the Den, and in the upper reaches of the Den itself, near the waterfall; one still stumbles occasionally upon the remains of early shafts and vents up there. So it was not altogether surprising that the Third Laird had at summons a considerable body of rough miners to aid him in the defense of the Lodging against the Earl of Morton. The careful drainage of these policies which the monks of the Priory had carried on for centuries doubtless helped mining operations: the colliers encountered few difficulties with underground waters or sudden floods which could not be resolved by the simple hand pumps of the age.

  “With the gradual exhaustion of the nearby pits, shafts were sunk higher up the brae, and then in the hills beyond. Early in the eighteenth century, fuel from the Balgrummo mines acquired a high reputation in Holland, where, I am told, the phrase ‘Balgrummo coal’ still is used archaically by oldfangled merchants to describe coal free of shale and earth. Once the steam-powered mine pump was made practical, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the lords of Balgrummo-as they became—greatly increased the production of their pits, so that these Inchburns, despite certain modes of extravagance, found themselves one of the richer noble families of Scotland.

  “They spent fortunes upon building and rebuilding. For all the size of this Lodging, they had a still bigger and finer house in Carrick, with three thousand acres about it, and there they spent much of their time-when the lairds and the lords were at home at all. Also they maintained old or new houses, by the nineteenth century, in Deeside, Fife, Sutherland, and Berwickshire. They had a large mansion in the Cowgate of Edinburgh, until the construction of the New Town, when they flitted to one of the finest houses in Charlotte Square. In London, they had first a house on Soho Square, and later on Berkeley Square.

  “Balgrummo Lodging, indeed, they visited seldom, for it was never a cheerful residence, and their Edinburgh house was more convenient for the pleasures of the capital. Yet they maintained the Lodging and its policies handsomely, and much embellished the place over the centuries—the splendors, now faded, which you still see. After all, this was the seat of their fortunes; and doubtless the legends of the place had a romantic attraction, especially during the past two centuries, and after Walter Scott referred to the Lodging, under another name, in one of his less-read novels. Gradually they accumulated here the magnificent library, with many rare books, which still is intact. Yet because seldom in residence, they never undertook any extensive demolition of the older portions of the Lodging, modernized it only superficially and in part, and left the house as you find it, an architectural and archaeological curiosity.”