The gravesite tarp was hauled back and the priest changed registers from bass to tenor as the water ran off the mound of dirt into the yawning hole. No one was sad at Brone’s passing. No one was happy to be at his funeral. It went like a speeded up film. The Holy Water sprinkled on the coffin as it was lowered roughly to the bottom of the grave was absurdly redundant. Not only was it raining, Brone had drowned. It was as if God and nature and the villagers of Darrig wanted to make sure he wouldn’t draw another breath.
His body had floated up against the pylon, or “the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu,” as the oldest inhabitants of the village still called it. He had drowned in the pond somehow, though no one could imagine why he would have gone in unless it was to save his wife Una, who was missing. They had dragged the pond but could not locate a second body. Some thought so ill of Brone McCabe as to suggest that he had murdered Una and drowned himself in remorse. Except it was hard to imagine blustery Brone remorseful over anything, besides which, as far as anyone could tell, he had been as fanatically devoted to his wife as he was disdainful of everyone else in Connemara.
Still, Una McCabe was missing. Not a sign of her in the house (the local gardai had searched thoroughly), no blood, no overturned furniture. His Nibs, the old hound, did not scratch at a loose floorboard or dig at freshly turned earth. It disappointed more than a few. So the stalwarts of Darrig performed their duty to the deceased in cursory fashion, while the county culled through statutes and mulled over what to do with the property should Una McCabe also be declared dead.
She seemed almost to be an unnecessary detail, because few in Darrig had even seen her up close, let alone spoken to her, and when she did speak it wasn’t in their dialect. A startlingly beautiful woman, she must have been two decades younger than Brone who was forty-one. Where had she come from? In this village whose customs and celebrations were no less hallowed than its rituals and rites, there had been no courtship, no wedding. Brone had gone away and come back with a bride. “Dublin,” he grunted in the pub when pressed about her origins. Brone had a rugged masculinity and modest means, nothing to suggest a fatal potency over women. Especially this one.
It was the mourners at the foot of the grave who saw her first. A moving shape in the mist from the direction of the pond, becoming then a human figure, then a female figure very female because she hadn’t a stitch of clothing on to hide her comely form. If they hadn’t seen Una McCabe up close before, they got to see her now. Naked to her navel, no matter which direction your eyes started from. Rivulets running off her firm breasts, down her tapered thighs. In the achromatic light she looked almost luminous, her ash blond hair nebulous, her sea-green eyes electric out of dark hollows. And something else that the women noticed for a certainty, and that the men afterward agreed must be true. She was pregnant and beginning to show.
Scota O’Neill threw an elbow into her husband Dolan, meaning for him to take off his jacket and cover the bare naked thing, but somewhat dumbfoundedly Dolan merely jerked an umbrella over the nude woman’s head as she continued to the lip of the grave.
“He’s not dead,” Una said in an even voice.
At once shock toned to sympathy, because obviously she was bereft. No one wondered how she knew who was in the coffin; clearly she knew and that was enough. The priest had his plastic raincoat over her shoulders now, but his arms were too short to hold it around her front without actually embracing her body.
“There, there, miss,” he said, “you must go inside ”
“He’s not dead!” she said with the timbre of a decree and pointed her arm ramrod straight at the coffin.
The gravediggers had begun to fill in just when she had appeared, and now the mourners thought it was dirt they heard rattling from the hole. But when they tore their eyes away from the nude woman, they saw that the shovelers had stood back. And then there was a beat, weakly at first thrum, thrum and then the eruption into solid thuds, frantic banging (Brone was a strong man), and the muffled cry.
Pandemonium. Whatever it was that was alive, several villagers with advanced heart disease were sorely tested. Lady Godiva and Lazarus in the space of two minutes was more than anyone wanted to comprehend. Gasps, cries, an odd shuffling away, then back again. The barber and the headmaster were the first to gather their wits and kneel in the mud to resurrect what should never have been buried. They got the thing upright in the grave somehow, like a mummy case, and Brone tumbled out through the split lid four rescuers and a corpse all standing in the grave. It wouldn’t be funny for at least a month when it was retold in the pub, and it wouldn’t be retold at all for two days. The Irish wit would take over then, allowing how Brone was welcome to die again anytime, naked women and all, if that was how he was going to do it, and that he’d put the “fun” back in “funeral.”
More sober assessments had to be made, nonetheless. Catalepsy was the accepted verdict. Brone McCabe had never been dead, that was clear enough, the headmaster said. The priest went along with it. The doctor kept his mouth shut. Only Laughlin O’Brien protested, insisting Brone had been dead and in the grave. “Naturally you’d feel that way,” Dolan said. “Brone would have become the Churchyard Watcher, if he really died. But looks to me that your father’s tenure has been extended until the next burial.”
The embalmer was the problem. He had done the thing, he insisted. Embalmed Brone right there at the house, like they did in the old days. But the embalmer was a good candidate for Darrig’s leading alcoholic no mean feat in that bibulous coastal village and it was more than suggested that he had put the embalming fluid in the wrong body.
“What wrong body?” he asked in self-defense. “There was me and there was the cadaver.”
“Well, you’ve got that right, Sweeney,” Moriarty Walsh said. “I expect the liquor store was closed when you went to work, and we all know how particular you are in your choice of personal preservatives.”
***
“You don’t remember goin’ into the pond?” Brone asked with an odd note of hope in his gravelly voice the night of his resurrection.
The doctor and the rest of them had finally gone home, convinced that he was stable. Another half hour and Brone would have thrown them out anyway. It was all that was missing from the funeral, a donnybrook. Now he and Una sat at the weathered table in the kitchen, hearthlight and moonlight battling the shadows between them.
“You know I never swim anymore,” she said listlessly.
“You had it on.”
“Had what on?”
He swallowed, guiltily somehow, like a dog who has just been caught digesting human food. His Nibs, in fact, looked up at him. “You were naked, you were wet how do you think that happened?”
“I don’t know. Did I fall in the pond? Oh. It was rainin’.”
“You brought me back, Una. You saved me. They were buryin’ me.”
“They were buryin’ you alive.”
“I couldn’t have been alive.”
“The doctor said it was a coma.”
“The doctor didn’t say that. Sweeney the embalmer said it.”
“The doctor, the embalmer I’ve never met either of them before. Didn’t he say he’d seen it once? A dead man coming back alive from . . . from a coma.”
“Catalepsy.”
“Catalepsy, yes. So, you weren’t dead.”
“I heard things in the grave, Una. I heard rumblin’ . . . and marchin’.”
“Of course you did. Half the village was tramplin’ six feet over your head, and the rain was drummin’ on the coffin.”
“It came from beneath me. From under the grave. An army . . . so close. And I knew things.”
“What things?”
“Things you can’t know if you’re still among the quick. And I heard far-away bells. They say you hear the bells in the distance when you die and go to Mag Mell.”
“It was the church. That’s far away, and they rang the bell for your funeral.”
Again Brone’s slow pasty swallow dre
w His Nib’s attention. “No one must ever be buried in the churchyard again,” he said. “It’s far too close to what’s underneath. No one must ever dig anywhere near the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu on this parcel of land.”
Her head came up, and he knew she was seeing as well through the darkness as she did through water. “So be it. The ground is nearly full anyway.”
“Then you agree? You know?”
“Know what?”
“What I’m talkin’ about. You must have known. You’re special, Una.”
She placed her cold soft hand on his.
“Not just special to me, Una. Special.” She patted his hand mechanically and he laughed in frustration. “Of course you don’t remember goin’ in the pond. You don’t know what you did, or who you are. How could you, you came back, and as soon as you did, it made you forget. You took the damn thing off and came back. I swear I’ll make it up to you. Don’t leave me again, Una.”
He wasn’t a man to plead, and even the dog was staring at him now. But with Una there were no games of power and pride, only mystery. He wheezed and sibilated through the darkness, but she didn’t seem to breathe at all. His heart ticked like a clock, a heart that she had caused to start again, and he felt that that fact alone should make them close at last, should bridge the gap. Why had she saved him, if she didn’t love him?
But she didn’t seem to be listening. Or rather she was listening for something else. When the silence between them dawned on her, she said, “I’m pregnant.” She never looked at him. He didn’t think it mattered to her what he felt; just that he needed to know what was coming. And what did he feel? A surge of opportunistic joy that she was much more his wife now. But it also poisoned her rescue of him. Had she gone into the pond thinking she would no longer be pregnant? And had she returned because she still was? And had she saved him only for that same reason: because he was her baby’s father?
He found it later, lying near the grotto. It. The thing she had found before she entered the pond and that she had taken off when she came out. He wished he could destroy it, but of course that was forbidden, if you believed the sidhe or shee, as it was pronounced lore. Brone McCabe wouldn’t do anything that could possibly sever his bond with the beautiful and intriguing Una. And he hid the thing again, as he must. Though he told himself it didn’t matter anymore if he possessed her or not, because his life was no longer his. It had changed when he heard the marching. Such an ominous trembling through the earth, a vascular rush into the wooden coffin flowing along stupendous and unsuspected arteries, as of legions in tunnels . . . so close below. Call it catalepsy, but he had heard it clearly enough. Call it the curse of his own Irish creed. He had walked for a time in the nether twilight of Tir na n-Og the isle of the dead he believed, and now he was the churchyard Watcher.
PERU
EAST OF CUZCO
. . . the same year
2
He ran for his life, ran for his soul. Because the thing in pursuit of him was not pure biology. True, it had a puma’s head, but it defied gravity and silver light scintillated off its flanks. It left splotches in the air when it moved, as if its materialization were not complete but only imposed from some other dimension. And the irony of that was not wasted on Rollie Andersen, despite his utter panic, because he and Tess had come here to the Peruvian Andes precisely to look for other dimensions.
In the 60’s they had crossed the major borders of their lives: college into commune, soft drugs into hard, the Mexican border, their thirtieth birthdays. No longer trustworthy or young or innocent, they felt vaguely betrayed by time. They had believed in life and love and peace, and now a decade later they were just part of an impoverished, aging diaspora struggling with its open wounds. It was unjust.
Expatriate hippies were blending back into society, but Rollie and Tess clung to NeverNeverLand as it receded like the second star to the right. They had tuned in and dropped out but had not turned on enough.
“Screw ‘em,” Tess said about the Lost Boys who had gone home to suburbia, “let ‘em drive gray cars.”
And they had pointed their psychedelic VW bus toward Chiapas until the transmission dropped, and then they had hitchhiked south and east and south again until Medellin became Miraflores became Moyobamba became Cuzco.
Thereafter the warmth of a drug rush was more like sleep than a spiritual awakening. They lost track of their rebellion, their anger, their moral indignation. They didn’t even know if Vietnam was still going on most of the time. And then Tess got pregnant and in the steaming roar of a tropical rainstorm one afternoon vowed she would take not so much as a single toke until she delivered this baby. Rollie cried with her, and swore he would do the same (the baby was their new Grail), but by sunset he had scored. And every day since.
That was nine months ago.
And now he was running for his life, running for his soul. Because he had stirred the thing in the cavern somehow. He had seen it flash momentarily in the water. The subterranean lake had lit up with it. A puma head and a glittering amorphous shape, rippling into being like choreographed fireworks. For a second he had thought it was just a reflection on the surface, that in actuality it was looming over his shoulder. But then the gluey green lake shivered without disturbing the image. It was underwater. And the catamount eyes were fixed on his, he felt sure. At that moment he knew that a merciless endgame lay ahead of him. And then the pyrotechnics faded and the lethal gaze in the underground lake dissolved like salt.
So he ran for his life, ran for his soul.
It never occurred to him to drop the stele he had pulled loose from the top of the pylon in the middle of the lake. That was what he had taken. A stone tablet, about the size of a large book, with a raised glyph. It was what he had been led there to get. “An artifact,” Miguel had told him. “Very old older than the Inca sons of the suns. Older than the gold altars to the Gods of the Deep in the Chincana tunnel.” This last assertion was an article of faith. Neither Miguel nor anyone who had returned alive from the labyrinth beneath the megalithic fortress of Sacsayhuaman had ever found more than scattered bones of human sacrifice.
Rollie knew the legends, knew the facts. Mixed the two.
Fact: Pizarro and the conquistadors had extorted only a fraction of the Inca gold after kidnapping then strangling the Emperor Atahualpa in 1533. Fact: the Inca empire from Chile to Ecuador and as far east as Bolivia was underpinned with unfathomed tunnels, which hinted that the bulk of the treasure could have been spirited across hundreds of miles. Fact: the labyrinthine tunnels were now mostly sealed because of danger.
Question: what danger?
Was it just that so many explorers had gotten lost, or suffocated, or starved to death trying to find their way out of the earth? Or was it related to the babbled accounts of one or two escapees who had allegedly stumbled forth from widely flung caves across the Andean range bearing gold bars? Rollie had researched for himself the news article in the Seria Documental del Peru about the Lima University expedition of 1923. Frightening stuff. Experienced speleologists losing contact with outside staff for twelve days, until one of them, emaciated and apparently unhinged, stumbled out with incoherent tales of incalculable horror.
Legend: before Manco-Capac, before the Inca themselves, before Viracocha the synthesis god of sun and storm, there were tunnels.
Rollie believed it all. The enchantment had sustained him, had postponed his growing up, had confirmed the psychedelic mysticism of his hippie odyssey. Peasant coca-grower and black marketeer Miguel had seen that the Yankee hippie had contracted the fever of the believer but that it wasn’t, strictly speaking, gold fever. Rollie Andersen wasn’t touristy and he wasn’t avaricious; he was desperate. Like Miguel. And he was a prisoner of drugs. That was useful. Lots of hippie culture interacted with the cartels that needed free spirits with American passports. But whenever the Peruvian authorities wanted to make a show of enforcement, it was the couriers particularly the gringo couriers who were expendable. A safer co
ntraband was Inca artifacts. So when Miguel came to him with the nervous revelation that he had discovered a spur off one of the tunnels, Rollie perked up.
“It is part of the Coricancha, I am sure of it,” Miguel said. “If I show you, you will give me my fee?”
If it really was an unknown part of something so grand as the Inca Temple of the Sun and its environs, Miguel would eventually tell the authorities and be rewarded, Rollie knew. But, of course, it made sense to loot some of it first. Except that Miguel was frightened.
“Share and share alike, if you help me retrieve it, Miguel,” Rollie said.
“I think you will not need help to take what I have seen, and . . . and to explore deeper.”
Rollie’s expectations flagged. Miguel hadn’t dared to search. The slender Peruvian claimed to be part Quechua Indian, and he believed in the puma legends. One look at Sacsayhuaman’s zigzag fortress walls, said to be the puma’s teeth, and Miguel would begin to sweat. “Show me,” Rollie said.
And that was why at first light he had left Tess alone in their two-room hovel, though twice he had caught her wincing as if she had commenced labor. “Go, go,” she said. “Find some gold. Don’t you see, it’s a gift from God, so we can go back to the States with the baby.”
But the god of love and life that Rollie had always vaguely believed in wasn’t in the cavern. Something with the head of a puma and the power of a demiurge was. It sputtered into being underwater as if rising from a great depth, but Rollie only thought the water trembled when he first entered the lake. Miguel was holding one of the flashlights on the pylon, and it seemed to Rollie that the waterline moved slightly against the base. Nevertheless, he swam away from his shoes and his clothes piled on the rock ledge, away from Miguel who had apparently noticed nothing.
The water was not icy as he expected. In fact it may have issued from some remote volcanic source deep within the Andes, because it definitely was not ambient with the stone and the air but much warmer. And it felt . . . thin. As if he might suddenly plummet to the bottom. He could not swim freestyle but had to use an upright breastroke, pressing and kicking down more than pushing water backwards in order to progress toward the pylon. Very tiring. Very noisy. The echoes of his splashing gave the impression of phantoms moving on the other side. And Miguel’s hand holding the flashlight must have been shaking, because the shadow of the pylon kept pulsing left or right, sending other shadows dancing around the base.
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