by Russell Kirk
Extensive carvings upon the walls could be made out dimly, as in the first cave, but no second catacomb of wall burials. “This place has been stripped by robbers or iconoclasts,” the Archvicar told them, “perhaps when the Templars were dispossessed, perhaps in 1500. No monstrance, no chalice, no ciborium, not one of the holy vessels to be seen; and no altar; and no body of Saint Nectan.”
“Nor any head, Nectan’s or anyone’s,” Coriolan said. “But the stone things remaining are marvelous. Do you suppose that Morton’s men sacked the Weem, after all?”
“No, for in their fury they’d have battered the carvings to shapelessness. These chambers have been denuded, so far as possible, but not desecrated. Probably the Third Laird meant to fit them up again, but wasn’t granted sufficient time. The cross, the pulpit, the baptismal pool, the saint’s coffin, the sacred carvings: these survive. With these, David Inchburn, Third Laird of Balgrummo, reputed warlock, really a papistical recusant, could have restored a catacomb worship. Given a trifle more time, he might have celebrated secretly the Council of Trent’s new Latin mass-to please his Bohemian beauty, like enough. Seeing all this, I think she must have been his Bohemian bride.”
Near one end of the sarcophagus, an irregular opening stood out in the torch beam, a greater blackness against blackness, almost a waiting mouth, inviting the reckless to enter. And close to the natural baptismal pool, Sweeney saw a third doorway. It was by this, he felt almost sure, that he had entered the cave in his vision.
Phlebas had crossed quietly to the mouthlike opening near the sarcophagus, and seemed about to venture inside. In a sibilant whisper, the Archvicar communicated some gibberish to him; and the little black man retreated to the Archvicar’s side.
“Don’t think of going into either of those black holes, just yet,” the Archvicar told Coriolan and Sweeney. “Up to this point, if we keep our wits about us, we’re safe enough: we have only to withdraw from this cave to the first cave, and then retreat out the passage to the vestibule, and after that through the tunnel to the monks’ drain, and last up the ladder-not, of course, that we’d be perfectly secure above stairs. Even were all of our lights to be extinguished here, we might contrive by thoughtful groping to come out of this Weem still hale of body and mind.
“But once a man passes through either of those two portals on the far side of this room, he’s in the labyrinth: I say this on the authority of Balgrummo’s scanty notes. Somewhere at the heart of that maze lies yet another chamber-with something inside it, I suspect-if one can contrive to creep all the way there. And beyond that center of the labyrinth may lie something more, something both symbolic and substantial.”
“You sound as if the thing went on for miles,” Sweeney groaned. He reached for a cigarette, but remembered that the Archvicar had forbidden him to smoke within the Weem.
“No, nothing like that, Sweeney, though I don’t know how extensive the labyrinth may be. Its enlargers had centuries to labor upon it, and the Scots have been good miners for a great while. It may not extend for more than a hundred rods in any direction; for that matter, it could be as little as a hundred yards in any direction. But the maze seems to be on several different levels, as if one were exploring a blacked-out tall hotel, and might forget what floor one had been on. The earlier part of the labyrinth is a subterranean watercourse, no doubt, whether dry now or still flowing. To this natural pattern, I gather from what I’ve read, the people who came down below to this underworld gradually added connecting and intersecting passages and blind alleys, also at different levels. Imagine yourself an ant inside a sponge, Sweeney: that image may give you some notion of our difficulty, once we enter either of those two openings on the other side of this chamber. It’s not so much a matter of length as it is of intricacy.”
“You’ll take another question?” Coriolan asked. “It’s this: why did men go down into these holes?”
Sweeney certainly didn’t relish prolonged abstract discussion deep within the Weem, however much it might suit Coriolan’s crazy fancy. Something might come at one out of those holes, any moment. Still, it was better standing here than pushing on into the labyrinth itself.
“Why, in search of transcendent power, in the beginning, I suppose: the power of the chthonian deities, or of the earth-mother. The early corners were after some mystery of faith, Coriolan.
“Then, in later centuries, came the Roman, or Romanized, votaries of Mithra, they too with their subterranean rites. There followed, perhaps after some considerable interval, the Celtic missionaries, or rather their converts. With them, or at least with the regular orders of monks that followed, this labyrinth was enlarged to become a symbolic representation of the coils of sin: a miner’s allegory of how, with Providence’s help, even a great sinner may find his way through the maze of unrighteousness to the salvation of the center; but also of how no man may attain that salvation except through God’s grace.
“I say ‘symbolic’ representation, Coriolan. But most people, in any age, confound the symbolic and the literal. Did such medieval pilgrims as may have been admitted to the interior portions of the Weem believe that they might be saved literally from the body of this death, by a mere physical progress to the heart of the labyrinth? Presumably some did think so; some did so act. Did any pilgrims win through, and win back again?”
Sweeney, half tipsy from the full cup of rum, felt about in the dark and gripped the Archvicar by the shoulder. “You think that this Weem, beyond this point, is a one-way street, and nobody’s ever come back?”
The Archvicar permitted Sweeney to clutch him, possibly sensing that Sweeney might have fallen otherwise. “Why,” he said, “I think that the last Balgrummo may have gone all the way to the center of the maze, and have come back. At any rate, he seems from his notes to have gone deep with the labyrinth, whether or not all the way to the center, and of course he returned.
“Yet there may be more to this labyrinth’s challenge than safe return to the point of entry. Some of the medieval pilgrims, or a few of them, seem to have aspired not merely to return to the Weem’s vestibule and reascend the Pilgrims’ Stair, but instead to attain the center of the labyrinth, and from there regain the outer world by some quite different route. This is hinted at in certain documents. This alternative route, a kind of literal via negativa—if ever it had any physical existence—seems to have been a mode of purgation. In the old documents, one encounters the suggestion that such a feat would have been accounted by the Church the moral equivalent of a pilgrimage all the way to Jerusalem; and by that via negativa feat, mortal sins would have been washed away-supposing the terrible underground pilgrimage of the Weem to have been undertaken by a humble and a contrite heart, in severe fasting and with ardent prayer, favored by grace.”
Coriolan had been listening in silence, his head close to the Archvicar’s. Now he said, quite loudly in the sepulchral cave, so that Sweeney jumped, “Why was the pilgrimage terrible?”
“Because,” the Archvicar answered, “the pilgrims had to pass through the symbols of devouring Time and merciless Death upon the way. I am not sure how those symbols were represented here, but they seem to have been dreadful.”
“Well, how many did pass through the clutch of Time and Death, to reach the world of life again?” Coriolan asked this gravely.
“I’ve found no record of any,” the Archvicar told him.
“Not Alec Balgrummo?”
“Not even the last Balgrummo.”
Coriolan stood silent. Then he said, “I must try.” He vanished from beside them; Sweeney’s torch beam caught him by the mouthlike doorway near the sarcophagus. Coriolan walked through that aperture, and at once the light from his lamp vanished; he must have rounded some turn of the passage beyond.
“Don’t do that, you damned fool!” Sweeney shouted after him, in real concern. At once the echoes took up the cry from many directions of this realm of night and of death and of devouring time: “... damned fool... damned fool... damned fool.”
“Back, Bain... back, Bain... back, Bain...” came the echoes, reverberating from beyond space, from beyond time. Coriolan did not call back.
And then Sweeney thought he heard something other than echo. Knock. Knock. Knock.
They had ceased to shout, and the echoes had ceased, and they stood shoulder to shoulder in that abysmal blackness, only Phlebas’ torch focused upon the passage mouth by which Coriolan had departed.
“Did you hear knocking somewhere?” Sweeney asked the Archvicar, trying not to panic.
“I think not. He took his pick with him, but nothing else.” Sweeney could not see the Archvicar’s face. The old man seemed to stand irresolute.
“Well, we’ve got to go after him, haven’t we?”
“Yes,” the Archvicar said, “so far as we dare. I have a pocket compass and a page of notes transcribed from Balgrummo’s journal; I don’t know what half the notes mean. Bring our things out of this chamber.” With the three picks, the torches, the rope, and the hamper, they crossed the cave and entered the passage beyond the sarcophagus. Here the floor sloped downward again, but only slightly. The passage, irregular and natural, was nearly as narrow as the monastic drain. After not more than six yards, it forked. The stony roof was low at this point, and the air seemed stagnant.
The Archvicar spoke to Phlebas, who set a match to one of the tallow torches, and held it high. It did not burn brightly in this atmosphere, or so Sweeney thought. The Archvicar produced a sheet of notepaper from a pocket, and examined it by the torchlight.
“We can’t leave him wandering about by himself in this crazy funhouse,” Sweeney declared with feeling. Concern for Coriolan had reduced Sweeney’s dread of the place. “Which way do we go now? Whatever got into Coriolan?”
“It must be to the right here,” the Archvicar responded, not altogether confidently, having consulted his compass. “Well, now for Ariadne’s thread.” He drew from his coat pocket a large ball of cord. “We’ll leave everything here but your pick and that coil of rope, Sweeney.”
Their scanty equipment they thrust as best they could into a crevice just around the corner of the next passage they were to follow. The Archvicar, Phlebas holding up the torch for him, wedged the two picks tightly into the crevice and tied to their crossed irons the end of his ball of cord.
“It’s conceivable,” the Archvicar was saying, “that Coriolan may make his way back up one or the other of these passages. If he turns one way, he’ll encounter our picks and torches-supposing his lamp still functions; if he turns the other way, he’ll find himself back in the second cave chamber, and so on an easy road back to the vestibule.”
“Is there a regular pattern to all this?” Sweeney asked him. “I mean, if we followed this long enough, could we catch up with him, or could he bypass us?”
“Most mazes have a systematic design, and one has only to follow what seems the natural path to arrive at the center,” the Archvicar said. “Sometimes it is much harder to get out again. Do you know, some mazes of medieval times, or earlier, may have been contrived to lure demons in and then prevent the devils from escaping? But this labyrinth, because of its origin in underground water channels, can’t very well follow regular lines. And from what little we’ve seen of it thus far, I think it might take ages, without clues or thread, to learn intimately the contrived corridors of this place. Happily for us, Balgrummo acted as our scout, stealing about these tunnels for many years; and if his jottings are accurate, and if I can interpret them tolerably well, we may get so far as the center of the maze. After that, what Balgrummo set down is even harder to understand.”
“Coriolan! Coriolan!” Sweeney began to shout again, and Phlebas joined him in a wailing African cry. From either unexplored passage, the last two syllables of the name were flung back to them.
“It’s down again for us,” the Archvicar told them. Taking the lead once more, he descended a kind of ramp, with here and there two or three steps in stone that all of them tended to stumble over. The Archvicar watched the wall on their right hand for openings; Sweeney watched the left wall. They came to one low gap on the left.
“Not yet,” said the Archvicar. “Keep on.” They reached a similar large hole on the right; the Archvicar repeated his command.
After what seemed to Sweeney a long descent, Phlebas’ torch showed on the right another opening, this time a round-headed doorway. The Archvicar consulted his notes and a folded chart, blinking in the glare. “Another descent,” he announced, after a few minutes’ musing. “Look sharp, now: I judge by a mark of Balgrummo’s that there may be a drop ahead.”
This time they found no ramp, but a narrow stair cut in the living rock, perhaps twenty steps in length. Phlebas continued to pay out the cord carefully. Halfway down the stair, one of the electric torches caught an effigy in the wall: a creature in a helmet, piggish-faced, with tusks. “Ah, the demon of the stair!” the Archvicar commented. “That must be a vestige of the Templars’ work. A pretty young fellow, isn’t he?” Sweeney didn’t think so.
A few feet farther on, there came a noisy rattle, and the Archvicar bent forward sharply; Phlebas caught him round the waist, to hold him if he were falling, and Phlebas’ electric torch clattered down the steps. The Archvicar recovered his balance, flinging himself backward against Phlebas; and the little black man, recoiling, nearly upset Sweeney. There came a distant crash.
“What in hell was that?” Sweeney directed the beam of his torch over the shoulders of his companions.
The Archvicar had caught himself on the edge of an abyss, it appeared; he now sat calmly enough on the lowest step of the stair, letting his legs hang into the terrible black space beneath. Judging by the time it had taken for the sound of that crash to reach them, it must be a considerable distance to the bottom of this pit. “A narrow squeak, that,” the Archvicar commented. He murmured some kind words to Phlebas. “We’ve lost two torches, but we’ve more above stairs. Can we make out anything?”
The light from the lamps and torches showed that the gap was too wide for anyone but a very practiced broad-jumper to leap; it would have been risky, that jump, even for a champion at the sport. So far as they could tell at their awkward vantage point and with their torches, the pit into which the Archvicar had almost tumbled extended some distance on either side, as if it were a channel or drain; but their own route, crossing the pit at right angles, remained narrow and low.
“A dead end?” asked Sweeney. Could Coriolan have leapt this?
“For more than one medieval pilgrim, quite possibly, this was,” the Archvicar replied. “But not necessarily, for them or for us. Look here.”
The Archvicar had his right hand resting upon a broad and thick plank; the plank’s other end must be on the opposite side of the pit. “My foot slipped on this wood, Sweeney; I didn’t kick it quite into the gulf, nevertheless. It’s begun to rot, but I suppose Balgrummo put it here; it may hold us. Shall I try?”
Oh, he was a cool one, this Archvicar, this Arcane! “Could Coriolan have got across?”
“Perhaps; this is a thick plank, and he’s agile. Are you quite ready, Sweeney?”
They essayed the plank bridge, Phlebas first, the Archvicar shining the torch before him; then the Archvicar; then, with misgivings, Sweeney. The plank quivered, but held, and Sweeney knew enough not to glance downward into the pit. Safe across, Sweeney and Phlebas once again shouted for Coriolan: no reply came.
“Quite like some level of Dante’s Inferno, eh, Sweeney?” The Archvicar’s voice did not quaver. “But the way seems to be widening now.”
Phlebas had run nearly out of cord; the Archvicar produced a second ball from his pocket, and they contrived to tie one end of it to a big chunk of rock projecting from the rough-hewn wall here.
Now curving to their left, the passage distinctly was broader; once it might have been an old stream cha
nnel, now dry, enlarged by ancient miners. They were not descending. Phlebas spoke a single word to the Archvicar, who interpreted for Sweeney: “He believes he hears water running.” Two or three minutes later, despite their caution in these contrived corridors of Time and Death, they nearly suffered a second spill. For, invisibly rounding a corner, the Archvicar cried out sharply, “Stop!” A low laugh, perhaps a little forced, came from him: “I’m wet to the ankles.”
Their torches illuminated a scene that put the fear of God into Sweeney.
They stood upon the brink of an underground river, or at least what would have been a deep burn, if above ground. The black water poured past their feet with cruel speed, scarcely rippling; so it must be deep enough to drown. It emerged from nowhere and vanished within range of torch beam, where the stream struck a rock face and sank beneath it, with a sinister steady flow, little whirlpools forming and vanishing.
Opposite the point where the three of them stood, their torches revealed only a sheer wall on the other side of the stream, and above that a roof or ceiling which shone black-a coal seam. So their passageway ended here, abruptly and grimly, at this vadose canyon in the hollow dark.
“Now, we know what one of the medieval pilgrims to the Weem meant by his words ‘rushing Styx,’” the Archvicar said softly.
Sweeney pointed to the terror of the secret water. “Did Coriolan go into that?”
“He did not have to come the way we’ve come. There may be three or four alternative paths in this labyrinth, Sweeney—but none of them, I fancy, with a more cheerful ending than this. At least we may drink of Styx.”
The Arch vicar brought up water in his cupped hands, and swallowed it. “There’s some taste of peat; this stream must run near the surface, higher up, earlier in its journey. It’s cold, my friends, as a Purgatory river should be.”
