Lord of the Hollow Dark (14 page)

“Damn it, it’s a path to nowhere,” Sweeney grunted.

“Shall we have a closer look at the back wall of this little passage?” Coriolan spoke as mildly as if he were offering to do a barnyard chore in exchange for a square meal. “When I was a boy I used to hear the old tales of a cave under the Lodging, but my rationalist father-do you know, we lived less than two miles from here-said the stories were rubbish.”

“Your dad had his head screwed on right,” said Sweeney. “We’re wasting time down here. Come on back up top.”

But Coriolan was poking at the rear wall with a chisel in his right hand, continuing his discourse as he inspected.

“Somehow the Ancient Monuments Commission became a trifle interested in rumors about the Weem, in Alec Balgrummo’s time, and asked to be allowed to pry about; ‘Ruins’ Richardson himself wrote to Lord Balgrummo. But old Balgrummo wouldn’t let them in the front door.”

He fell silent while driving in his chisel a little way with a mason’s hammer; then he resumed. “Purgatory or whatever it may have been, the place was sealed by the Archbishop of St. Andrews about 1500. Columbus had discovered America, and earthly Purgatories were going out of fashion, along with much else. Getting rid of spiritual Purgatories is another matter, though. And why should we wish to be rid of them? Since most of us aren’t saints, our alternative to Purgatory is Hell.”

“So nobody’s been down the Weem since the sixteenth century, you mean?”

Coriolan was probing at the terminal wall with a short crowbar, the acetylene glare of his carbide hat-lamp disclosing blocks of ashlar. “I didn’t say that, old man, and I didn’t mean that.”

Sweeney scowled at Coriolan’s strong back. Although one of the few normal-looking people at the Lodging, intellectually Coriolan was a conundrum. Half the time you’d swear that he was a lame-brained tramp, and the other half of the time he sounded like a professor of history.

Coriolan’s big tranquil face with its light blue eyes, its prominent nose, its deep scar running almost the length of the left cheek-that face, for all its seeming openness, could not be read. The discomfiting thought passed through Sweeney’s brain that this Coriolan, or Bain, might be a cunning detective. Could Scotland Yard be on the scent of
smuggled kalanzi,
or inquisitive about what Apollinax was up to here? Yet what policeman would have chosen to come down to the Lodging that breakneck way, with the odds ten to one that he’d have smashed every bone in his body? Only a Keystone Cop would have done that. Or what detective would be learned about the sixteenth century and earlier?

Sweeney directed the torch more accurately upon the narrow wall face. The masonry-yes, blocks of stone here, not native rock—was dry, but beyond that wall might lie an abyss of black water or a trap of firedamp.

Coriolan ran his hairy fingers along the joints of the ashlar blocks; he peered closely at the wall, Sweeney holding the electric torch over his shoulder. “See here, Sweeney, old chap: no trace of mortar between these joints! The monks used some mortar everywhere else in these drains, where they needed masonry. Higher with that torch, please. Aha! Now look sharp: this great long stone, almost as high as my head, seems to have the function of a lintel. Heartening, eh? I fancy that someone once chiseled the mortar out from between these stones, because there had been a doorway in this wall once, and could be again. Whether the blocks could be extracted now without bringing everything down on our heads, I can’t say at the moment.”

Coriolan squeezed aside so that Sweeney could have a look at the wall face. Indeed this wall differed from the others in the sewer; indeed that long horizontal stone did look like a lintel. Sweeney could see how it might be just possible to create an opening below it-though through terribly hard labor in this cramped space, and then with no certainty of finding anything behind the wall but native rock. “If this is a kind of doorway, when was it made, Bain-Coriolan, I mean?”

“Why, Sweeney, it’s later than the sewers, I fancy. My knowing the history of this place is of some help. This looks like late sixteenth-century work, hastily done, though the blocks themselves come from older work, I take it. The third Laird of Balgrummo, called the Warlock, may have had this done-this, and more.”

“Why?”

“To make a temporary new entrance to the Weem, I suppose, replacing the grand entrance, the Pilgrims’ Stair, that had been destroyed seventy years before, on orders from Rome. It seems to have been his ambition to restore the Pilgrims’ Stair, but we don’t know how far he had proceeded with that project. Some thought in his time that he was establishing in the Weem a false religion or witches’ coven; also it’s been suggested that he was merely trying to open a secret place for Catholic recusants to celebrate mass-with hidie-holes for fugitive Roman priests.

“Probably he had his men work at restoring the Pilgrims’ Stair chiefly from below, they getting to the foot of the Stair through this little tunnel that lies before us. Architecturally, this privy way into the Weem was clever of the Laird, don’t you think?

“Then, when Morton stormed the Lodging, the Third Laird must have blown up both the work of restoration on the Pilgrims’ Stair, and this tunnel before us. We don’t know how thoroughly the Third Laird’s gunpowder may have broken down the Weem; for all we can tell just now, there may be only ruin beyond this masonry.”

Sweeney had his doubts. “How could the Third Laird have had time to put these stones back into place, if the Regent’s men were hot after him? For that matter, how could he and his men have sealed this tunnel from the outside, if they were on the inside?”

Coriolan chuckled. “You’re quite right, Sweeney, in saying that it couldn’t have been the Third Laird who sealed up this doorway. Doubtless he blew up both entrances to the Weem, if there were two then, to baffle Morton. No, this present wall just in front of our eyes, or at least the part of it blocking the old doorway, must have been built by other hands, later.”

“You mean that the Earl of Morton walled his enemy in?”

“I don’t think that. No doubt Morton hoped to break through the rubble on the Pilgrims’ Stair, in search of the Laird’s money, but it must have been slow and perilous work, and Morton hadn’t time enough: he fell from power only a few days later. If Morton and his men knew about this side entrance from the drain, they may have attempted that, too. But Morton’s people mayn’t have discovered this sewer access at all: one doesn’t think immediately of searching a disused sewer for an entrance to a shrine, and the jakes of the Priory
necessarium
may have been overlaid with flagstones in the Third Laird’s time, as now. Morton’s people may have had no notion of how Inchburn and his surviving men contrived to escape into the Weem, except that somehow they must have made their desperate way down the wrecked Pilgrims’ Stair. Or even if Morton’s men did find this drain postern here, the tunnel back of this wall must have been choked with rubble from the Laird’s petards.”

Now Coriolan was inserting his chisel in cracks between the stones about halfway to the vaulted roof. “Risky, risky... Why, the walling-up of this doorway may have been done not many years later, by the Fourth Laird, who affected to be a pillar of the Kirk of Scotland. He’d have wanted no one to go the way his father had gone, down the road to Avernus.”

Sweeney wished to know whether the Third Laird might have slipped out of the Weem by a third route. This meant another digression by Coriolan, and Sweeney hated to linger here, but he must have some hopeful news to take back to Apollinax. Coriolan continued his gingerly prying at the stones.

“What did you say, Sweeney? Another way out? Why, nobody ever saw our mercenary captain the Warlock Laird after he had gone down here wounded. Who knows what he intended? Perhaps to rendezvous with Maitland of Lethington, his old friend, in Fairyland. God have mercy on his soul.”

Knock knock knock! But it was only Coriolan who had made Sweeney’s heart jump. The tramp had taken up a mason’s hammer and was driving a wedge between joints of masonry.

“Christ’s sake,” cried Sweeney, in his double fright, “is it safe to work down here?” He had in his mind’s eye a brief vision of himself squashed flat by the collapse of this tunnel, his body left here below forever, his ghost trailing after the Third Laird’s, up and down and round those cunning passages, knock knock knock.

“Safe?” Coriolan squatted, prodding with his chisel here and there. “No, old chap. Somewhere above us, in the north face of the oldest part of the Lodging, there’s a mortared crack left from the Third Laird’s explosion down here in his last fight-a crack from top to bottom of the tower. And look at these props here”—Coriolan laid a hand on something Sweeney had not made out in the darkness, one of two pilasters of rock fragments that buttressed the roof of this side passage. “It’s a marvel that the whole complex hasn’t tumbled down, though clearly the Fourth Laird did what he might to secure things. He had good masons and time enough, what with King Jamie’s peace.”

“So it’s impossible to break through?” Sweeney shuddered to think how Apollinax might rage on being baffled; but it would have been scary work, and he did not really care to see what lay behind that wall with the lintel-stone inserted into it.

“I don’t say that.” Coriolan had shifted his prying to another area. “It’s dangerous, but the thing has been done before. You suspected that, didn’t you, Sweeney? I see you’re looking at the right spot; you’ve an architect’s eye in your head.”

Indeed Sweeney could discern now that below the seeming lintel-stone were vertical lines in the masonry, on either side, in effect outlining a vanished rude aperture, through which even a big man might pass, were the ashlar blocks with-drawn-and supposing that the lintel might hold against the weight from above pressing down upon it. This last was doubtful: some subsidence seemed to have occurred in recent years, and a number of the ashlar blocks were bulging outward from the wall.

“Aye,” Coriolan went on, “it looks to me as if these stone teeth had been drawn not so very many years ago, and then thrust back into place again. Alexander Fillan Inchburn, tenth Baron Balgrummo, went through here.”

“
Went through here?
”

“Who else? What a labor it must have been for a lone man, elephant though he was! But old Jock, his keeper, may have lent a hand; must have.”

How did this kilted tramp know everything? Sweeney had to face it out. “Damn it, who are you? Are you from the C.I.D.?” He turned his torch upon Coriolan’s face.

“No, no,” Coriolan told him, blinking but unperturbed. “Sometimes I think I was an engineer once. Do you mind focusing on this particular area, instead of my eyes? Thanks. Now take this one stone: it protrudes so very far that strong men, with tools, could pull it out like a wisdom tooth. Alec Balgrummo and Jock couldn’t have got a winch along the narrow drain, I take it; but they must have had grapples and other tools, and I fancy that those should be somewhere about the place, possibly in the stables at the back. If they reopened this doorway, or virtually made it, you and I and some of those boys ought to be able to find our way through, too-that is, if Balgrummo’s entry didn’t so weaken the fabric that everything might come thundering down overhead.”

“Hell, you actually think that old Balgrummo, the last one, made a hole? Why should he have gone down here?” But Sweeney saw that the thing was conceivable.

“Alec had half a century with nothing better to do.” Coriolan stood up and stretched manfully. “Yet I can’t speak to his motive, Sweeney, old man. Why does Mr. Apollinax mean to go down?”

Sweeney repressed a snarl. This tramp must be humored. How did he know all this? Presumably he knew a good deal more, and it might be wheedled out of him. And dubious though this eccentric’s knowledge of architectural engineering might be, still he was Sweeney’s only recourse. “How long would it take to clear that doorway-if we can call it a doorway?”

“With the right tools, and three or four of those young men fetching and carrying, and reasonable caution-why, providence helping, we might contrive it within twelve hours.”

Sweeney nodded. That would do, though there was no telling what obstacles lay behind that bulging wall.

Coriolan seemed to read his thoughts. “Mind you, Sweeney, the roof may have fallen beyond, where the train of powder was laid, and there may be no chance of passage at all; or this doorway may not lead into the Weem itself, but only open on the lower part of the Pilgrims’ Stair, so that we’d still have to gain entrance to the Purgatory proper, which might be harder yet. We don’t know whether Alec Balgrummo made any progress beyond this spot. But find the tools, and I’ll lend a hand, if you like.”

“I’m worn out, Coriolan, and it’s past midnight, and we have till Wednesday for the whole job. Come on upstairs.” Tired though he was, Sweeney would spend an hour, if necessary, trying to pump this Coriolan-Bain.

Coriolan was leaning against the supposed blocked-up doorway. “Wait!” he said. “Put your ear against this wall.” Sweeney did that, puzzled, and then started convulsively. Did he hear something, or was it fancy, the grim memory of his nightmare? Surely the sound was very faint and distant, if it was a sound. But it seemed to come again. Knock. Knock. Knock.

“O Christ!” Sweeney gasped. “You hear something?”

“I don’t know, old chap. Can it be knocking somewhere? Or is it more settling, more falling of stones within the Weem, with all the dead weight of the Lodging pressing down, century after century, upon the passages beneath?”

“Let’s go up top!” Sweeney scurried out of the side passage into the main drain. As he turned the corner in haste, his torch struck against the hard wall and fell from his hand.

Dark, dark, dark! “They all go into the dark.” Sweeney stumbled, hit his forehead against the wall, broke his carbide lamp, reeled round, lost any sense of direction. Hoo-ha, hoo-ha, hoo-ha, he was alone, alone, alone in blackness! Sweeney began to shout, to scream, to squeal.

“Coriolan! Coriolan, where are you? Bain! Captain Bain!” There was no trace of Coriolan, no glimmer of his torch. “For Almighty’s sake, Captain Bain, I’m hurt!”