Lord of the Hollow Dark (15 page)

Sweeney’s voice echoed hideously up and down the drain, but no other sound came. He might as well have cried out for the Weem Fathers or the Warlock Laird. He was becoming afraid to cry out, Sweeney was, for fear of what might answer; but he made one more try: “Bain, Captain Bain! Coriolan! Won’t you help me?”

No reply at all. How long had Sweeney been fumbling and groping and squalling here? He was beyond space, beyond time, perhaps in eternity, in a Timeless Moment.

Had that Coriolan, that Bain, ever been present at all? Was he a part of somebody’s dream? Somehow, all along, Sweeney had suspected that Bain, having come out of nowhere, would vanish back into nowhere. Like a devil, that Bain had lured him down this sewer and left him to die in terror; then Bain, or Coriolan, or whatever he was, had melted into the cold stones. Sweeney knew his forehead must be bashed in, and he would bleed to death in this anus of the Lodging. One last desperate shriek: “Bain, Bain!”

Something seized Sweeney by both arms. Sweeney could not speak at this assault; he only gurgled.

“Sweeney, old chap!” said a calm voice. “Why all the calling out?”

Sweeney was supported by Coriolan’s strong arms. He was giddy in his wonderful relief, Sweeney was. “Coriolan? Where did you go for so long? Where’s your torch? I thought you weren’t coming back.”

“Long?” Coriolan said. “Long? I’ve little sense of time left. Where’s your torch, old man? Underfoot? There, I have it.” Coriolan switched on Sweeney’s torch.

“How bad am I hurt?” Sweeney implored. “Look at my head!”

Coriolan obliged. “Nothing but an abrasion, I’m glad to report, Sweeney. You scraped it a trifle; it’s not even bleeding properly.”

Coriolan was really here, talking, reassuring, not faded into the stones! Now that they had light, Sweeney could see that the ladder leading up to the old
necessarium
was only a few feet distant. Up Sweeney scrambled. Hoo-ha! Coriolan followed more slowly.

In the storeroom that had been part of the vanished priory, a single gas jet burned. There was a rough dusty kitchen table with two chairs beside it. Sweeney would have liked to put more distance between himself and the sewer, but his legs would not obey him. He collapsed into one rickety chair. Coriolan, still more scratched and scuffed now than he had been after his fall in the Den, sat in the other chair.

Sweeney took a good hard look at his companion. In every way, Coriolan seemed substantial, and a damned sight more normal looking than most people in this house. Yet Sweeney felt a grue. If he, Sweeney, were to get up from this table, turn his back on Coriolan, walk five paces, then swing round-would Coriolan still be there? Would this Captain Bain turn invisible, as he had vanished in the sewer? Sweeney hadn’t the faintest notion why he had this suspicion of Bain’s substantiality, yet he entertained it. Was he going crazy himself, in this crazy house with its crazy inmates? Talk, Sweeney, talk; make this Coriolan-Bain talk; make him seem real.

“Now tell me this,” Sweeney began, his hands trembling. “What’s behind that damned wall we were monkeying with?”

“Bones, I suppose, among other things, old man.” Coriolan was placid about it. “Old bones, the bones of David Inchburn and such of his men as followed him down, when the Regent Morton forced this house. David the Third Laird had a woman with him, too, or her corpse: she’d been shot in the fight.”

The shivering horror of his nightmare settled upon Sweeney; he tried to speak to Coriolan, but stammered and choked, and at length contrived to say only, “Where do you get all this?”

“Very little of it from books, the assault on Balgrummo Lodging having been no better than a small episode in the dying days of Morton’s regency, and that in a time when raids on big houses or lairds’ towers were almost weekly events. For that matter, little enough has been published about the Inchburns of Balgrummo, ever. They were a secretive lot. Your Archvicar may be the first scholar ever to have full access to the Muniment Room papers here. Did you know that David Inchburn, the Third Laird, the mercenary commander who did those high deeds in the Continent, was a dwarf? He may have been merely bandy-legged, though. We might tell by his leg bones, if you and Mr. Apollinax find your way down. Interesting to know. But those bones may be under water.”

It occurred to Sweeney that if he could keep this erudite Dr. Dryasdust of a tramp on the track, he might find out, before it was too late, why Apollinax meant to take them all down there. Go easy, Sweeney, go easy: be civil to this bum. “Yes, interesting. Now what else is down there, Coriolan?”

“The Head may be down there, for all we know.”

“The Third Laird’s head? I couldn’t care less.”

“No, no-the Templar’s Head, I mean, if ever it existed. The legend runs that when the Templars held this land, they adored a mummified head: such a charge was brought against the Templars at Paris and elsewhere. An eldritch thought, Sweeney?”

Knowing Apollinax, Sweeney reflected privately that the Master might very well count upon unearthing that head.

“By the way,” Coriolan ran on, “Morton’s own head was taken off on Castle Hill, three years after his sack of Balgrummo Lodging-for other causes than what he had done to David Inchburn. Heads came off easily in those times; there may be more than one head lying about the Weem. There exist places, don’t you know, where past evil lingers. It might rise up through that hole in this very floor...”

“Come off it, man!” growled Sweeney, desperately ill at ease here above the sewer. “Come off it!”

Then Sweeney and Coriolan leaped to their feet. As if Coriolan had been a conjuror, somewhere in the Lodging a woman was screaming, bestially squalling, shrieking as if her soul were being wrenched out. Although he knew women’s moans of desperation, Sweeney never had heard a yell like this.

“For God’s sake...” Sweeney cried.

“Not for God’s,” said Coriolan.

Past one in the morning, Marina was awakened by terrible screaming. It must have been distant, in some other wing of the Lodging; yet it went on, peal after peal, a woman in extreme hysteria or torment, and did not stop for some time after Marina had heard the noise of running feet and then the sound of agitated voices.

Marina did not open her door: she dared not leave the baby alone, and still did not know her way about the labyrinthine house. At last, after all was quiet, she sank into sleep. So far as she could tell when she rose at half-past six—hoping that Mr. Apollinax might have arranged to talk with her early in the morning—her dreams during the night had been nothing like the fearsome experience of her first night in Balgrummo Lodging. There had come dreams, indeed, and rather unpleasant ones, so far as she could recollect fragments of them; but they had not been paralyzing. Had visions worse than hers compelled that unknown woman to scream so hideously in the small hours?

Phlebas brought her the pigeon-egg omelette that the Archvicar had promised; she had been too tired and puzzled last evening, after Mr. Apollinax’s lecture, to eat a morsel. It would have been pointless to ask Phlebas about the shrieking in the middle of the night: she couldn’t have understood any reply of his. So, having fed the baby and finished the omelette, she took Michael with her to the door of the room where, she thought, the Archvicar and his wife slept. Fresca opened to her knock and gestured to her to enter.

It was not a mere bedroom, but a well-appointed little suite, consisting apparently of a cozy parlor, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. Fresca was clearing away breakfast things. The Archvicar and Madame Sesostris were dressed and about, the old gentleman studying some papers at an eighteenth-century bookcase-desk, the old lady amusing herself at a game of patience with a deck of strange-looking cards.

“Did you hear that dreadful screaming last night... ?” Marina began. Madame Sesostris nodded calmly. “A case of hysteria, my dear. Fraulein von Kulp thought she saw a strange man near the door of her room, in the eighteenth-century wing. They’ve put her to bed for the day; and since she begins screaming all over again if she’s left alone, one of those serving girls has been assigned to sit by her bedside.”

“Fraulein von Kulp, of all women, to be horrified by the sight of a man at night!” the Archvicar put in, with a wry pursing of his lips. “She was in the hall, returning to her room-from the bathroom, she says, but perhaps from someone else’s chamber, which contravenes Apollinax’s present rules—and was about to enter, her hand on the door, when she turned at some faint sound. She then saw a tall man, one she had not set eyes or hands upon before, and began to screech, and has been squalling intermittently ever since.”

“But really, Archvicar, it wasn’t simply a man, in the ordinary manner of speaking,” Madame Sesostris added. “By the Fraulein’s account, so far as it could be got out of her, the thing was a phantom, a drifting shape, with the vague outline of a man’s face and eager burning eyes. And there seemed to be a knife in the thing’s hand. Of course I don’t vouch for her accuracy. She doesn’t know whether the thing touched her; she has no notion of what happened after she began screaming, for she was out of her head until an hour or two ago.”

“If he didn’t bother to touch her, the Fraulein may have screamed from chagrin.” The Archvicar locked his mass of papers in a drawer.

“Really, Archvicar, you’re impossible! The poor creature may lie in a state of shock for days.” Madame Sesostris put away her deck of cards.

“Do you think she’d benefit from the laying on of hands? In my ecclesiastical capacity, I stand ready.” The Archvicar turned toward Madame. “Actually, my dear, how many of these our fellow guests are worth troubling one’s self about? You saw them wolfing their despicable food last night-Marina was disgusted, too, weren’t you, Marina?—and you heard their talk, such as it was. What a crew to lie under this ancient roof! Many of them have money; few of them have manners; and as for brains and character, words fail me. They are vessels for dishonor. Don’t send them to me for a cure of souls; it would be easier far to preach to wild beasts at Ephesus. The last Lord Balgrummo entertained some persons of dubious report, or a repute worse than dubious, but he never would have endured such abominable manners; he’d have swept this set out of his gates. I’m not setting up as a moralist; for me, as for Burke, vice loses half its evil when it loses all its grossness; but these our fellow lodgers are at once vicious and gross. They’d have been ostracized from the Cities of the Plain.”

“Excepting present company, surely, Archvicar.” Madame glanced reassuringly at Marina.

“Excepting our dear Marina, naturally!” The Archvicar hobbled over to Marina, took her hand, and kissed it gallantly, rather as an Austrian officer might have. “Of course I don’t include Coriolan in my indictment, if we count him as a guest: he has manners and a good heart, I think, even if he does dress in rags. I remember his father slightly, a gentleman of principle-nineteenth-century principles, that is, among them a rather dogmatic rationalism.

“By the way, it’s odd, but I had some faint recollection of having read, years ago, that this Captain Ralph Bain had been shot through the head in the Western Desert in a clash with one of Rommel’s regiments. I remembered his name because of my acquaintance with the family. And some years later, I thought, I had read of his being killed somewhere in Scotland—some curious scrape. But one can’t trust the papers—or, perhaps, my memory.

“Well, long life to Coriolan! Apparently he did take a bullet in the head somewhere, which accounts for a certain vagueness about him; still, he’s no fool.”

“You said last night that he was helping Mr. Sweeney below stairs,” Marina interrupted. “Did they find what they were looking for?”

The Archvicar made a gesture of triumph. “Eureka! I had only a few words with him and Sweeney when we met in the wee hours beside the squalling and flailing Fraulein; but they gave me to understand that they had found a concealed passage leading up from the old drain, going Lord knows where. They must be reporting in detail to Apollinax this moment; he’ll be cheered, our Master.”

“Then Mr. Sweeney isn’t in disgrace now?”

“If he has found what I suspect he may have found, he’ll stand high in favor until his next blunder. Actually, I suppose it was Coriolan’s doing; he has remarkable perceptions. And speaking of Apeneck Sweeney, I am willing to grant that rough fellow a partial reprieve from the sweeping sentence of condemnation which just now I imposed upon the present denizens of Balgrummo Lodging. Sweeney’s manners are lamentable; his tastes, disgusting; his life has been a continuous infamy or humiliation. And yet I detect in him a faint glimmer of decency, on occasion. As I told him to his face, at least his vices are natural vices. I might pluck him out of this Sodom, should the need arise; I might even adventure somewhat for his sake. In a barrel of rotten apples, one is gratified to discover even one not totally spoiled. Shall we pray that grace may be extended even to such a one as Sweeney?”

There came a pounding at the door: it was the girl Dusty, looking for Marina. The young lady was requested to come immediately, with her baby, to Mr. Apollinax’s study; the Master had set aside a few minutes for her.

It had come, that coveted interview! And now, her head in a whirl, Marina didn’t know quite what to ask the Master. After all, hadn’t he explained to everybody last night, and hadn’t she been too stupid to apprehend most of what he had said, even though it had seemed to be aimed particularly at her?”

“It will be best to let him talk,” Madame Sesostris confided. “That pleases him, and you needn’t tell him
everything
about yourself, my dear; women shouldn’t, not to any man.”

“Don’t keep him waiting, child, for his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute,” the Archvicar told her. “Think of him as if he were Alice’s giant caterpillar, but don’t bite any toadstool he offers you.”

For all her nervousness, Marina laughed; it was heartening to recognize, at last, the source of one of the Archvicar’s literary allusions. She followed Dusty to another part of the Lodging, passing on the way two of the disciples, that de Tornquist woman and Professor Channing-Cheetah. Madame de Tornquist looked straight through her, indifferent, not speaking; the professor, glancing up from a book, barely nodded. Yet she felt quite sure, without bothering to turn her head, that once she had passed them they stared intently after her.