Lord of the Hollow Dark (37 page)

For a moment there was total silence. Then came a general gasp, a loud drawing-in of breath; then shrieks, and cackling malevolent laughter.

The background of this enormous cartoon, executed with savage fantastic skill, was Golgotha. But only two crosses had been erected upon that fatal hill, and those two crosses of St. Andrew. One cross was tall, the other short. About the crosses crowded a rout of naked ugly figures, pointing upward, thrusting upward.

There was nailed to the tall cross a beautiful young mother, writhing naked in the last agony. There was nailed to the small cross a baby boy, too young even to have crawled.

This was not all. The victims were ringed about by tormentors on the ground, thrusting lances into their bodies, burning them with torches, tearing them with pincers.

This cartoon, a work of diabolical genius, was indescribably more horrid than any painting of a martyrdom ever shown in any gallery.

“Behold the false boy-god and the false god’s mother!” Apollinax shouted. “This shall we do!”

Up from disciples and acolytes rose a frantic laughing cry, swelling and breaking and rising again.

“This have I promised you!” Apollinax cried, his voice rising above the laughing scream of the mob. “Down to the Ceremony of Innocence, which shall endure beyond Time!”

They all poured out of the chapel. Marina had fainted, Sweeney saw: half dragged, half carried, by Doris and Dusty, she was swept through the doorway. He was seized and hurried along by Sam and Pereira, and his friends too propelled toward the cellars, the drain, the Weem. The Master strode before them all.

Sweeney was pushed and prodded past Grishkin. She stood staring, fascinated, at the cartoon; and for the first time there was an expression upon her painted face, but an expression not easily identified. The Archvicar limped along on his stick, guarded by Krum and Snow.

They all went down below, and their screaming laughter echoed through the whole Lodging, frantic enough to wake the dead.

Through the monks’ drain they ran, some of them lurching, the disciples and the acolytes, passing into the tunnel that led to the Weem’s vestibule. They bore flaming torches of pitch or tallow. As they went past, they chanted confusedly:

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine:

Domine, exaudi vocem meam!

Marina, held up by Doris and Dusty, was conscious again. Do not consent, she kept repeating silently, even in the agony! All sped past her, even Madame Sesostris, hustled on by acolyte-girls; Phlebas, kicked and jostled by his guards; Sweeney, a pistol at his ribs; Fresca, clutching Michael. Marina wailed when she saw the baby vanish down the tunnel. Then came the Archvicar, hobbling painfully by himself; he turned his face toward her as he passed, but said nothing. She was left with Grishkin and the brute girls who were gripping her.

Marina herself was crying out of the depths, but to another Lord than Time the Devourer, Lord of This World.
Libera me de sanguinibus, Deus, Deus salutis meae.
O deliver me and my baby from bloodletting!

“Now you, Bride, last of all!” said Grishkin. A burning torch in her hand, Grishkin led on.

The girls rushed Marina along a tunnel propped with timbers, lighted up by Grishkin’s torch. She did not resist.

They came into the wreck of a vaulted undercroft, where an acolyte-boy stood guard over a heap of pistols and shotguns. The scarlet robes had been discarded, for a pile of them lay beside the weapons.

A low doorway loomed in the opposite wall. The girls would have forced Marina into it, but Grishkin said, “Wait!”

She snatched off Marina’s outer white robe and flung it on the pile of scarlet robes; now Marina stood livid in her wedding finery. Grishkin took up a thing that lay near the robes, and fitted it over her own head and neck. It was a huge raven’s-head mask. Grishkin handed other masks to the acolyte-girls, and they put them on: weasel-mask, wasp-mask. Marina’s vision of Saturday night was being fulfilled.

Then Grishkin, having handed her torch to the boy-acolyte, flung off her scarlet robe; so did the acolyte-girls. All of them had been quite naked beneath those robes. Grishkin pirouetted like a dancer in ballet, her splendid firm body corybantic beneath the light of the torch she had snatched back.

“Now take in the Bride to her bridal!” Grishkin cried. Doris, stooping, went through the doorway; Dusty pushed Marina ahead of her. They were in another passage or tunnel, with flickering lights ahead. They dragged and prodded Marina through that passage.

She stumbled into a crypt or cave, the underground hall of her vision. Then Grishkin the Raven, leaping high, bounded past them.

The cave was lit by many smoky torches thrust into sockets in the rock walls. A few people still in robes huddled at the far end of the hall, beside a tremendous carved cross of stone. Marina made out Michael in Fresca’s arms, and Madame Sesostris, and Sweeney.

This hall resounded with the chanting, but now a fast, frantic, shrieking chant. As they chanted, the creatures danced; and except for the beast-masks, all were naked. They whirled, capered, spun, strutted, jumped, reeled, wriggled, rolled, bounced, pranced, in Dionysian frenzy.

Yet was there a pattern to their dance, despite its wildness? It seemed as if they danced in an intricate maze, weaving their besotted way through invisible passages.

They collided with one another, fell, rose again, kicked, bumped, flung their arms high, twisted like serpents. In their ecstasy they hurled themselves about, disciples and acolytes promiscuously mingled, all masked as the beasts that perish, gaunt bodies, flaccid bodies, strong bodies, fat bodies, smooth bodies, hairy bodies, wrinkled bodies, equal in their abandon.

A delicate high-breasted shape hovered near Marina for a moment: beneath the lizard-mask, was it von Kulp? A bare shapeless thing wearing a sow-mask wavered up close, weak yet quivering with bestial energy: “Welcome, Bride!” Marina shrank from the Equitone beast.
Domine, dirige nos!

Into the midst of these dancers bounded Grishkin the Raven, Grishkin the Coryphee, gyrating as if born for this passionate moment, shameless and superb. Drawn by her perfect agility, the beast-dancers circled about her, mowing, gurgling, shrieking. Grishkin leaped incredibly high, turned cartwheels, somersaulted like a practiced acrobat, snatching back her raven mask when it threatened to fall from her. The inspired mistress of these ultimate revels, she glistened exultant in the torchlight, burning with her hard gem like flame, naked splendor and frenetic terror wedded. Suddenly Grishkin the Raven screeched so long and loud that the others fell silent; she drooped, sank gracefully upon the stone floor, and stared toward the center of the hall; and all the others did as she had done.

A thing with a pallid body, a leonine mask upon its head, stood in the middle of the cave. It spoke, and spoke with the voice of Apollinax. “Behold the altar of sacrifice!” it commanded.

Beside the Master was a rough heavy butcher’s table, and upon it lay a hatchet and a gleaming sickle. “I am Kronos, Devouring Time,” Apollinax’s voice came, “and here on this altar lie my sacred instruments.”

Kronos gestured toward the far wall. “Behold also the rood of the Mother and the rood of the Child!”

Upon the cave’s floor, not far from the tall stone cross, two crosses of massive timbers lay. Unlike the Celtic stone cross, these were in the form of an X, one very tall, the other smaller. They were like the crosses of that hideous cartoon in the chapel, Saint Andrew’s crosses.

All the beast-people sat perfectly silent now, peering raptly through their eyeholes at Kronos the Master. Some had been famous, some rich, some possessed of power; now they were pure beasts, promised that they should become pure spirits.

The lion’s jaws of his mask yawned wide, and Apollinax’s voice filled the hall. Shivering convulsively, Marina lay on the floor between Weasel-girl and Wasp-girl.

“The place is here, the hour has come,” the Master called out to his congregation. “All of you twenty-four who have chosen me shall enter upon the Timeless Moment. In the agony of the victims, you shall know the most intense of joys, and shall know that delight forever, wanting nothing more.

“Yet you are not alone, my disciples and my acolytes, for these others, although unworthy, shall enter with us into the Timeless Moment. They shall consent to all, and be drawn into our Moment, and divert us everlastingly, forever writhing, forever expiring, forever shamed. Through wiles or through compulsion, they shall consent to degradation, and shall never return to the phantom realm above.”

The baby, in Fresca’s arms, wailed dismally. Marina struggled to rise, but Wasp and Weasel held her to the floor.

“Here the Child, the false god!” the Master shouted. “He shall be divided among you. What before you have fancied only in dreams, you shall consummate most literally in this place. In our communion, we shall take and eat the flesh; we shall take and drink the blood; and let no one of you shrink from this table our altar. You shall be bound together eternally by this timeless communion.

“Yet before our communion, we shall witness the marriage of sin and innocence. Bring forward the Bride!”

Wasp and Weasel raised up Marina from the floor and pulled her toward the towering stone cross. Hooting, squealing, cackling, the beast-people stared at her in her bridal gown.

Now Marina stood free, her back against the ancient rood; Weasel and Wasp had drawn away from her. Into her mind flashed the General’s face. She mustn’t be unworthy of her father! There she stood, very erect, eyes wide, defenseless. Think of what the Archvicar said, and hope against hope, Marina, Deborah Fitzgerald; don’t consent at all, in speech or thought.

Out of the corner of her eye, to her right, Marina could see Michael and her three friends in their scarlet robes. They were on their feet, near an archway with blackness beyond it; the acolytes who guarded them had crept closer to Kronos.

“I have told you,” Apollinax’s voice was saying, “that a craven dwelt here. Out of fear, he rejected the Lord of This World, and so perished.

“Yet that one has not departed. Dead, he suffers here always. Hear me: this dead coward who made the great refusal, who rejected the gifts of the Lord of This World, shall do our bidding this night. He shall be summoned, and he shall be the Bridegroom. Before the sacrifice, we shall join Death and Life, that craven and this foolish Mother. You shall witness their union, the coupling of Sin and Innocence, and they then shall be destroyed. Let the priest call the dead!”

The beast-masks turned toward Marina’s left. A pulpit, carved from the living rock, loomed up there, among shadows. And from those shadows emerged the hobbling figure of the Archvicar in his black gown, helped along by Phlebas in scarlet.

With difficulty, in the expectant silence, the Archvicar mounted the three or four steps to the pulpit, his stick clattering against the stone. In this elevated place, his body, above the waist, emerged as if he were truncated. His goggle-spectacles shining in the torchlight, the Archvicar began to speak.

“Here is a place of disaffection,” the old man said. “We have little light here below: ‘only a flicker over the strained time-ridden faces.’ You seek to flee from Time. Yet only through Time is Time conquered.”

The Master had shifted closer to Marina, that he might see the Archvicar better. Marina, in her intensity of awareness, saw a scowl begin to come over Apollinax’s face.

“Presences have been stirring here,” the Archvicar went on. “The Master has drawn them as if he were a magnet. These presences differ one from another. One may come to rescue, another to destroy. Augustine of Hippo tells us that there are no dead; death is a transitory phase of a moment, insignificant; what matters is the eternal state beyond what we call ‘death.’ And sometimes, in some places, those we call the ‘dead’ are seen by us again. Perhaps they come if our strong emotions, and theirs, are made to coincide. We fancy that we evoke them: but in truth they are sent to us, agents, for purposes we may not know. The Master has opened this place to such corners from the Throne or from Gehenna. Yet if such presences enter, will they depart again at his command?”

The Master in his lion-mask, as if angered, took three steps toward the pulpit. “Summon the dead coward!” he commanded harshly.

The Archvicar did not glance at him. “The Master has ordained the marriage of Death and Life, Sin and Innocence. Yet in the nature of things, that may not be. The Master has ordained the communion of blood and license; yet in the nature of the human creature, that may not be. The Master would roll up Time into a ball, that you might torment one another forever within that ball; yet that is called Damnation.”

The Master strode close to the pulpit. “Old fool, do what you were told to do!”

Marina, preternaturally alert to everything now, saw that Kronos’ body was trembling with fury, his hands clenching and unclenching.

“Have it as you will, Master Kronos,” said the Archvicar. “Yet even now, it may not be too late to release the presences, to dismiss them. Master, would you look upon the dead? Do you know what may follow from that forbidden desire?”

“Shall I read your future in your guts, Gerontion?” Apollinax snarled. “Summon the one who perished here and is forever chained here!”

The Archvicar raised his hands high. “I am to summon not a coward, but a man of blood who lingers here in torment. He is near at hand. But I tell you, he is no smooth servant; and if he is admitted to this place, others may press in.”

He called out in a loud voice, “Those who have been drawn to this spot, hear us! Alexander Fillan Inchburn, do you hear us? One who calls himself the Lord of Time summons you. Will you come, Alexander Fillan Inchburn? Will you join with us in this final ecstasy of waste and shame?”

A long murmur swept over the fantastic congregation of the possessed. The Master, and they, stared first in one direction, then in another, waiting for some form to emerge from the shadows of the Weem.