At Balgrummo Lodging, a great decaying house near Edinburgh, gather the grotesque members, old and young, of a curious society. Given names from the poems of T. S. Eliot, they are the disciples of Mr. Apollinax, possessor of occult powers. He has promised his followers an intensity of experience they never had known before-a kind of immortality to be attained in a mystical "timeless moment" of transcendant sensation.

This rite is to be performed on Ash Wednesday, in the "Purgatory" that lives beneath Balgrummo Lodging: a pre-Christian and medieval maze sealed at the Pope's order in the sixteenth century. In this subterranean realm, to which ancient legends of diabolism cling, Apollinax will proclaim himself Lord of Time—with attendant horrors.

Yet has Apollinax underestimated the sardonic old being called Archvicar Gerontion, once " a brutal and licentious soldier," who is present at the Lodging as Apollinax's necromancer? Has Apollinax left out of his reckoning a dead man of power, the last Lord Balgrummo, perhaps lingering with his murderous axe in the hollow dark?