Lord of the Hollow Dark (26 page)

“He was mad thereafter, perhaps. I don’t mean that he was a raving lunatic. But thereafter he was a prisoner, not in this house merely, but in a single instant of Time: the time of his atrocity. Effie Inchburn says that thereafter her uncle was one-tenth alive, nine-tenths dead, though walking about and hale as ever, until his last three or four years. He withdrew into his interior Hell.

“T. M. Gillespie, the Inchburn solicitor, says that Balgrummo, for the half-century after his Trouble-or what part of those decades Gillespie knew him-was ‘quite rational, in the sense that he could transact the ordinary business of life when pressed.’ He refused to sell any of the pictures in the Lodging, despite the recommendation of his trustees: after all, only fine books and fine pictures remained to him. And in other ways he behaved with shrewdness and prudence.

“One of the more lively instances of his relative rationality occurred after the Attlee government had nationalized the coal industry. By that time, the Balgrummo Pits had been worked out, the vastly increased cost of miners’ wages taken into account. Gillespie, incidentally, had succeeded in obtaining quite tolerable compensation for Balgrummo Estates at the time of nationalization; then it had turned out that the National Coal Board had acquired little more than a maze of derelict shafts and levels. Well, four years later, representatives of the Coal Board came to Gillespie, and eventually to Balgrummo himself, to announce their new scheme for extraction.

“They proposed to mine, open-cast, the Den and the whole policies of Balgrummo Lodging. The Lodging being an historic building, inhabited, they would not demolish the house itself; but they would leave it standing in a treeless desolation of abandoned open-cast pits, the Den denuded and eroded. The Coal Board, you understand, had authority in law to do that sort of mischief, provided that they should pay compensation—their assessment—to the proprietors of surface-rights for the damage the Board may have wreaked upon agricultural and forested land. The officials had with them geologists’ charts which indicated that broad and thick strata of coal, now exhausted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century pits up the brae, must extend beneath the policies of Balgrummo Lodging.

“On being informed of this scheme, Balgrummo insisted that Gillespie bring the Coal Board’s representatives here to the Lodging. He received them quite civilly, like a man of business. They gave him the details of their plan. ‘You will not do that,’ Lord Balgrummo said.

“They wanted to know why not; they pointed out, one of them rudely enough, that they were vested with the authority to do precisely what they intended, and had done such things at other old country houses.

“‘Because, gentlemen, no coal worth extracting remains in the Den or these policies.’ To the surprise of even Gillespie, Balgrummo then produced from his muniments old maps and plans of the estate, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, showing that his ancestors long ago had worked out the seams for more than a mile in every direction from the Lodging. The Coal Board people departed in humiliation.”

“If they had commenced open-cast operations just here,” Coriolan remarked, “they might have broken into the Weem, accidentally.”

“Precisely. Balgrummo had no intention of entering after that fashion; he had his own plans, and by that year must have been down to the Weem himself, more than once, through this little door which temporarily defies us.” The Archvicar tapped Kronos’ muzzle again.

Sweeney shuddered at the reverberation. “So you mean he was normal, living all alone in this place?”

“Not at all normal. His was a life in death, or something between death and life, a most peculiar state. Dr. Effie Inchburn has told me, ‘He wasn’t present merely in one room, you know: he filled the house, every room, every hour. Balgrummo Lodging was like a saturated sponge, dripping with the shame and the longing of Alexander Fillan Inchburn.’ The man was a living ghost.”

“And there were those three or four mysterious deaths, weren’t there?” Coriolan asked.

“Quite right. The trustees, and even the police, kept the fatalities quiet, so far as they could. One of the deaths wasn’t mysterious, actually: burglars with ladders had contrived to get over a dyke, on the side of the policies toward that derelict linoleum factory, and Jock Jamieson, the night keeper, caught them and used his shotgun on one. Jock told the police that the man had reached for a weapon, and fortunately for Jock a revolver was found in the belt of one burglar. Even without that, I suppose Jock wouldn’t have been gaoled: the police tolerated a certain license in the use of firearms by keepers at Balgrummo Lodging—remembering that it might be necessary to keep Lord Balgrummo in, as well as to keep two-footed predators out. A second burglar had his back broken on that occasion, incidentally: someone had pitched backward the ladder by which he had been climbing to a second-floor window, and there had been no one in the house that night but Balgrummo himself.”

“What about those other two fellows, earlier, who came down from the Den cliffs and weren’t seen again?” Sweeney demanded.

“I guarantee nothing, but I’d not be surprised if we should encounter their bones somewhere beyond this door.” The Archvicar tapped Kronos a third time, to Sweeney’s discomfiture. “Was Balgrummo a killer? On provocation, yes: in that limited sense, mad. He prized his pictures, and he had shed a great deal of other people’s blood in Africa—as I have—and perhaps the two miner-burglars resisted him. Besides, it wouldn’t have done for him to report to the police his killing, even if in self-defense, of two intruders: what with his earlier slayings, the second offense probably would have sent him to confinement in a public lunatic asylum. Possibly he stalked them through the shrubbery of the Den; he was expert of old at that sort of exercise. They had challenged the Minotaur, and they ended in his labyrinth.”

“I’m told that something inexplicable occurred since my time here,” Coriolan said. “On the night Alec Balgrummo was found dead in his bed, another man, a thief, was found dead on the floor of the chapel, without a mark on his body.”

“You’ve been accurately informed, my dear man. The other corpse was that of an accomplished picture thief, South African, I believe, who passed under the name of Horgan: an old hand at the business, armed, vigorous. Balgrummo, on his last night among the living, must have been unable to stir from his bed; nevertheless, he seems to have protected his pictures—which was more than the keeper at the pend could do, for Horgan had coshed him on his way in.

“I asked a medical examiner about Horgan. ‘Informally,’ he told me, ‘I must say that I think he died of fright; I saw his dead face.’ Thus one thinks of Apollinax’s talk of ‘essences’; and one remembers how the Society for Psychical Research has found that the kind of apparition most frequently encountered is one of a person about to die, or of one just dead. Perhaps Balgrummo strode across the great gulf of Time.

“Tom Gillespie, though a disciple of Davie Hume, has his own theory about the case: ‘If any man’s or woman’s consciousness should have penetrated to Balgrummo’s consciousness, to his time scheme, to his world beyond the world—or if, through some vortex of mind and soul, anybody had been sucked into that narrow place of torment, Balgrummo’s private internal Hell—why, then the intruder would have been consumed.’ Gillespie, by the way, would not sit for very long in the same room with Balgrummo, even when the last Lord was near his end; he seems to have feared that he might be ‘drawn into Balgrummo’s mind.’ If Tom Gillespie’s brain isn’t addled, Balgrummo in his confinement may have developed certain powers that he had sought in vain between 1910 and 1913.”

“He’s gone, anyway,” Sweeney sighed.

“Has he? Apollinax thinks otherwise. Balgrummo is the being he expects Archvicar Gerontion to evoke—to do the Master homage, or something of that sort. I know a little of such attempts, but I’m no séance director, my friends. Could the real Gerontion have accomplished the feat? Conceivably: certainly the real Gerontion once sent me into what seemed to be another and highly unpleasant world, employing
kalanzi
for that purpose; but I’ll not trouble you just now with that digression. Yet with the last Balgrummo I do have ties of blood and character: I might be as good a necromancer as anyone could be, in this peculiar case.”

“Do you think that he’s bound to this spot?” Coriolan asked, very seriously.

The Archvicar took his time about replying; lit another cheroot; then spoke to Coriolan with an uncharacteristic hesitation, looking at the head of Kronos rather than directly at the man he addressed. “Perhaps, Bain, you know more of such possibilities than I do. Well, everything is energy, electrical particles, the scientists tell us nowadays: all matter is in flux. Perhaps, as Apollinax devoutly believes, particles once assembled in a particular arrangement may be reassembled in that form, under propitious circumstances. The ‘essence,’ moved by impulses that we do not understand, may enflesh itself once again in those particles which once made up its physical being. To use oldfangled words, the vagrant soul may constitute a body for itself once more. I put the possibility clumsily: I’m no physicist. After all, the ‘matter’ of which human beings are composed, we are now told, is an arrangement of positive and negative charges, so to speak—insubstantial, really, though appearing so solid. What do you think, Coriolan?”

Coriolan also hesitated before replying. “We’re made for immortality,” he said presently. “The soul, the ghost in the machine of the body, the animating spirit, goes somewhere. All one knows for certain about such things is one’s own personal private experience. I...” He broke off some chain of thought, was silent a moment, and then resumed, “Well, if you want my opinion—yes, the essence of what was called Alexander Fillan Inchburn is somewhere, though not in what we call ‘material’ form. The circumstances of every soul depend upon the will of God. But, if you’ll pardon me, I didn’t ask for a general theory, Archvicar; I asked whether you think that the essence, the soul, of the last Lord Balgrummo is chained to this place.”

Sweeney followed these two scarcely at all in their discourse. They seemed to be engaged in a kind of gentle probing duel of words, the Archvicar and Coriolan, neither wishing to strike home.

Now the Archvicar looked directly at Coriolan: “Confined, dead as living, in his private Hell still, here? Why, if that’s possible for any soul, it would be most possible of all for the last Balgrummo. He never left this house for more than half a century; such a one becomes attached to place, rooted. When I was a boy, people used to talk of‘earth-bound spirits.’ The Lodging and the Weem were Balgrummo’s world, and it hasn’t been long since Balgrummo’s death. I don’t think you need dread very much the Warlock Laird and his men, Sweeney: if ghosts of a sort, those are only shades, echoes, vestiges of past emotion, powerless now to harm or help, dead four centuries. But Balgrummo, who pervaded every room of the Lodging even while he lived—well, Balgrummo is another and graver concern.

“Within a few hours, we’ll follow in his footsteps,” the Archvicar continued, after scrutinizing Kronos again. “He’s as much the demon-god of the Weem as is that bronze beast there. I have reason to suppose that Balgrummo passed through that low doorway many times, over the years. Why? Could he not have found everything there was to find upon two or three expeditions, at the most? Or did he worship something there? I fancy not: his ruinous experience that ended in his Trouble probably cured him of infatuation with false gods. Even though mad thereafter, in some degree, he had been cured of little superstitious follies and poses. So far as I can remember him from my boyhood, on my occasional unhappy visits here, he seemed disillusioned of much.

“So why did he explore the Weem repeatedly, spending whole nights in that haunted place, perhaps? I judge from his coded notes that he did so. He contrived an enduring clue to the labyrinth behind that door—his own Ariadne’s thread. What was Balgrummo after? What could he hope for, pledged by his word of honor never to set foot outside the Lodging and its policies? Why did he seek the hollow dark?”

“All right, why?” said Sweeney. “You tell us.”

“I have a theory,” the Archvicar answered, though as if he were talking to himself, “but it can’t be substantiated yet. I think that on many nights Balgrummo came down from his suite in the tower—that’s where he slept all his years after the Trouble, perhaps for the view those rooms command—and entered the Weem for some conscious purpose. He came down that little hidden stair, unsuspected by anyone—the stair by which our Marina frustrated your folly of last night, Sweeney. He went to his work in the Weem. I am beginning to suspect what that work was—if it accomplished nothing else, it kept him fit even when he was more than ninety years old—but I sha’n’t tell you yet.”

“Thanks,” said Sweeney. It couldn’t much matter, anyway. “But what I really want to know is, how are we going to get out of this hellhole before Apollinax gets crazier?”

“Balgrummo went beyond that bronze door,” the Archvicar continued, as if uninterrupted, “and labored away in that ghastly labyrinth. Oh, he must have had steel nerves. Did he hear the footfalls of the dead file of the Third Laird and his men, every time he went down? Did he hear the tapping of their ghostly picks—knock, knock, knock?”

“By God, that’s what I dreamed, but I hadn’t told anyone,” Sweeney exclaimed. “Do you read minds better than Apollinax does?”

“Others before you have dreamed that dream of the lost men,” the Archvicar told him, unsurprised. “I dreamed it myself, more than once, when I slept here as a boy. At first the vision repels you; then it draws you down.... I suspect that Balgrummo dreamed it often, and heard it while awake, too, that sound and others, while he was down here below.”

“I think you two really believe in those damned ghosts,” Sweeney said, uncertainly. As he spoke, he looked all round the narrow space in which they three were confined.

“Can you give me your definition of ‘ghosts,’ Sweeney? No? Do I talk nonsense? Let me turn conjuror.”

The Archvicar rapped hard, three times, on the bronze door; then stood unmoving. From somewhere far within, it seemed, there came back a series of sounds of a different sort, not wood on metal, but metal on stone. Knock. Knock. Knock.