Read Online Lord of the Hollow Dark by Kirk Russell - Free Book Online

confounding pre-Christian times, the medieval period, events of the Reformation, and later episodes.
    What with the mobility of population in recent decades, and the destruction of the nearby ancient village of Fettinch, some nine years ago, to clear the ground for the new Fossie Housing Estate, there survives virtually no continuity of local population from which otherwise some significant folklore clues might be gathered. In any event, here as elsewhere, the successive coming of popular newspapers, films, radio, television, and other modern diversions has obliterated local folklore as “oral history.” Let me express my sorrow that I have been unable to gather substantial unrecorded evidence of that character.
    Notwithstanding, it may be said confidently that until the early years of the present century, and indeed as late as the time of Balgrummo’s Trouble in 1913, some among the population of this parish at least half believed that preternatural phenomena continued to occur within the Balgrummo demesne. The vanished souterrain, according to a number of elderly persons, was the abode of warlocks and witches; according to others, the stronghold or the prison of fairies. At the time of the Trouble in 1913, three or four cottagers of advanced years testified to journalists that in their youth they had heard “the music under the hill,” the sound of chanting or wailing beneath Balgrummo Den, which at that time had not been closed to strollers. One woman perhaps ninety years of age, who had been a servant girl in the Lodging when fifteen years old, volunteered the information that she had heard such revelry—if we are to call it that—beneath the Lodging itself.
    With such fancies or traditions were mixed up memories and legends of the fate of the Third Laird and his followers, self-immured in the Purgatory. These were said still to cry out for rescue; as late as 1895, two coal miners in the nearby Balgrummo Pits (disused since nationalization) declared that they had heard tappings on the walls of the shafts, from the direction of the Lodging, and even faint imploring shouts, allegedly from the lost Laird, his paramour, and his armed men. The miners did not endeavor to break through to the damned; they fled as fast as they could up to the pithead.
    Almost certainly the area near the Lodging has been a haunted spot for many centuries; some of the legends have an origin obviously pre-Christian, and St. Nectan’s Purgatory itself seems to have been a pagan religious center converted to Christian, or quasi-Christian, observances. There survive many other such examples of mystical continuity in Scotland, such places having been resorted to until the Reformation. The many “holy wells” are the most common manifestations of that continuity.
    As for your question concerning the objective reality of the phenomena associated with the souterrain here, I must decline again to commit myself. When a young man, I did incline to believe that some activity of the sort continued under the Lodging. With regard to the now-popular theory of “earth currents” which you tentatively advanced, I am of no fixed opinion.
    4. Necromancy. When I agreed, dear sir and employer, to undertake certain tasks for you on satisfactory terms, conjuring was not mentioned. It is true that once I was put on trial in the Shan States, charged with necromancy. But I must remind you that I was acquitted, or at least that the verdict of the magistrate was the equivalent of the Scottish “not proven,” two principal witnesses having disappeared during the interval between my arrest and the court hearings. Moreover, I was charged in that instance with having raised up a small boy who had been buried less than twenty-four hours, and of compelling the corpse to serve me as messenger. It would be a very different matter to raise men and women buried alive three centuries ago. “Catch the shadow ere the substance fade.” I protest that whatever powers of