PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

“It will!”

  “No. Look at him.”

  “We can pull the cliff down around him until it reaches his neck.”

  Wielding the shovel like a bayonet, she stabbed the overhang, ringing off a stone but levering out a chunk of earth. The younger understood and began to rake the muck they had shoveled out of the hole back around the body. In the McCabe house, Mr. Billy broke into a fusillade of barks.

  They had the burned and partially paralyzed man buried almost to the neck when a hand rived out of the grave or was it only out of the storm? arresting the older woman’s shovel. Dulled by her labors though she was, she sprang back, letting go the tool as if it were molten. With a sharp cry, the younger woman did likewise, her shovel dropping in the mud. The figure who menaced them was as grim and steely as The Dark Man (the Far Dorocha, silent abductor of mortals) himself, which given the desperate Irish superstition that impelled them on their task, seemed not improbable. But, no, he spoke:

  “What are you doing! Get him up . . . get him out of there.”

  “He’s been struck by lightning, but he’s still alive,” the woman rattled, recognizing Brone McCabe. “We’ve got to get him buried to the neck in hallowed ground. Help us!”

  Brone subtracted the mud from the women and came up with Sheelah Walsh and her daughter Alanna. The man with the bloodied and burned face would be her husband Moriarty. “Get him to the doctor, woman.”

  “No time.”

  Brone leaned close to the head sticking up out of the mud. Its eyes were closed within bloody sockets, its mouth hung open as if in a final cry of agony. “Dear God, he’s dead.”

  “He’s not dead . . . he’s not ”

  “He’s dead! You can’t bury him in Thiollaney Merriu!”

  Shattered and quavering, Sheelah Walsh stood fast. “What if he is? It’s still hallowed ground, and he’s been struck by the Devil’s own lightning. You know the legend. It’s not too late to bring him back!”

  “That’s just an old wive’s tale. You can’t bury him. No one’s been buried here for twenty-eight years.” Brone pitched a shovelful of gritty mud away from Moriarty’s head.

  The older woman yanked his arm until he met her eyes inches away in the rain that beat on their faces. “You . . . you . . . Brone McCabe,” she hissed, “yes, you know better than anyone what can come back from the dead in this very yard! You’re the last one buried here!”

  He tore his arm away and began to dig furiously. But on the third stab of the shovel blade, a flash of lightning ripped the heavens in half and Moriarty’s eyes shot open like bloodied beacons.

  “He’s alive!” Sheelah cried.

  “Thank God,” Brone said, if for a different reason, and dug maniacally. The earth they had chopped away from the overhang was still loose despite the water running into it, and Alanna was no help to her mother who kept pulling at Brone’s sleeve until he flung her off.

  Moriarty was making a tremulous sound now, gagging as if he couldn’t close his palsied lips or turn his head, couldn’t stop the water from flooding into his mouth. Alanna Walsh crawled forward from the lee of the overhang where she had been crouching in near hysteria and tried to wipe the water from his face but succeeded only in adding mud. And then Brone had him under the armpits and was pulling him free, alleviating the pressure on Moriarty’s chest.

  “Damn you, Brone McCabe!” Sheelah cursed him.

  “We’ll get him to the house and call the doctor.”

  “It’ll be too late. Give him to me.”

  She wrapped her arms around her husband’s chest as if to deny Brone custody, but in fact he provided the lifting as she towed Moriarty to the barrow.

  “You’re daft,” he shouted at her when she made for the gates. “The house . . .”

  “May your house be struck by lightning as mine was. May you bury your mate in the ground you denied mine!”

  5

  Brone’s daughter. The flower from the mud; the diamond from the coal; the crystal out of the fire. Sosanna McCabe’s pixie eyes, now broadened and deepened to almond at age twenty-eight, seemed to be the only concession to her paternal bloodline. And yet she had been her father’s wee lass, no doubt about that. An enchanting child enchanted by worlds seen and unseen. A child who pricked her thumb to study the blood, and kissed a toad to see what would happen, and released feathers in the updrafts from the cliff so that the sea birds would get them back. But only the white feathers. The ones with color belonged to the rainbow, she had been assured by her father.

  The vindictive village of Darrig had never wanted a sweet child of magic and mystery to come out of Una McCabe’s womb. The elder women especially struggled when Sosanna grew to a princess before their very eyes, spurning young lovers, charming older men, earning the secret and reluctant admiration of many of Darrig’s younger women for her fire and untouchable spirit. What they had wanted and expected was a freak or a changeling who clearly bore the judgment of God on the McCabe family. But Sosanna McCabe had dual citizenship from her first childhood wanderings, brightening Darrig’s streets, romping in its fields, excelling in the little village school, and returning at day’s end to the sullen and solitary house at Thiollaney Merriu. The mother’s genes had won, some said. Others doubted Sosanna was Brone’s issue at all, though none could reconcile the supposed and necessary dalliance with Una McCabe’s aloofness.

  “Ask me, the whole family’s fokkin’ strange,” Laughlin O’Brien said. “Look at me, do I look like I did the day Brone come out of the grave? But Brone he’s barely aged. Dyin’ must be good for a body.”

  Scarcely arguable. Brone and Una McCabe seemed to be aging very well, which is to say hardly at all, though the latter was never close enough for anyone to truly judge, and Brone himself delighted in the speculation. “It’s all the dead that’s around us,” he said with a rare smile when Dolan dared the sarcasm that he had forgot to grow older like the rest of them. “Their souls need to express vitality, and we’re the closest mortals, so they transfer energy to us.”

  Sosanna heard and didn’t hear. Voices buzzed like flies in bottles, whereas eyes were eloquent. “Intuitive, she is,” the barber’s wife noted, “that girl has secrets.” Born in a house on a cliff, where land and sea fought a never-ending border war, the solid certainty of earth was in direct conflict with the fluid mystique of depths and tides. Secrets were all around her. And they offered up no eloquent eyes to be read, so she listened for their whispers and was vexed by their silences.

  She felt she was receding somehow, losing contact with everything surrounding her while still in her twenties. There were times when the loneliness was so impenetrable that no amount of engagement with people or nature made a difference. People or nature. Why did they act like opposite poles in her life? She had never desired to leave Connemara, or to marry, and those two facts seemed less shocking to her the older she got. What she wanted what she needed was to be welcomed in one world or another.

  So the day after the big lightning storm which killed Moriarty Walsh and through which Sosanna had slept as though thunder were her lullaby, she returned from the village in a state of extreme agitation. It wasn’t just that hurtful things were being said about her father she had endured that before it was those looks. When she caught the red-eyed hollowness of Sheelah Walsh’s glare, she knew there was no exaggeration in the facts. And when Alanna Walsh had to be restrained from clawing her while Sosanna was trying to pay her condolences, she walked away shaken.

  Back up the long road from the village to the coast she marched, in through the finialed gates to the churchyard, skirting the markers and the pond, across the little wooden footbridge that spanned a dry ditch, and into the house where she could tell by the composed silence that her outrage was anticipated. She tried not to be outraged. She washed her hands for no other reason than to delay fulfilling their expectations, and while she dried her fingers and peered hard out the window at the pond, she said: “You’ve probably not heard the outcome.”

&nbs
p; Seconds passed. “Outcome?” her mother repeated airily.

  “I suppose you slept through it, too.”

  “Slept through what?”

  She really didn’t know, Sosanna thought, and turned on her father. “Mr. Walsh is dead.”

  He sat at the heavy plank table, pulling burrs out of Mr. Billy’s fur as the dog lay at his feet. “Lightnin’ is nearly always fatal.”

  “Nearly. But hope isn’t.”

  Brone buried his fingers in the dog’s withers, yielded a weary sigh. “Out with it, lass.”

  “They say he was buried nearly to the neck. They say he was still alive then. How could you have dragged him out of the churchyard?” She took a couple of shallow breaths. “Would it have cost you anythin’ to let them finish?”

  “More than you know.”

  “Oh, well, don’t tell me, father. I don’t want to know that you had your reasons.”

  A look passed from Brone to Una. “It’s not fit for a daughter to question her father.”

  “Then what they say in the village is true, you let him die.”

  “Sosanna,” Una warned.

  Brone clapped his knee and Mr. Billy sat up. “They say, they say, they say. Since when have the villagers not had their say at my expense? Did they say why Moriarty’s woman didn’t go for the doctor? Did they say I tried to bring him to the house? You can be sure the lot of them don’t believe hallowed ground can save a victim of lightning to begin with. Nor will they blame Sheelah Walsh for making a foolish choice when she might have got him medical help in time. No, never mind that, easier to blame ol’ Brone as if I had thrown the lightning bolt. I can tell you without fear of contradiction, there are some in Darrig are glad Moriarty Walsh died, given the circumstances of what I had to do.”

  “What you had to do?”

  Brone clutched Mr. Billy’s withers, gave them a gentle shake. “He would’ve become the Watcher, if he had died in hallowed ground. He would’ve displaced . . . the last one.”

  “And what difference, may I ask, would that have made to the dead?”

  “None maybe to the dead, such as lie in Thiollaney Merriu. A great deal to the livin’.”

  She knelt before his face, knelt so close that Mr. Billy licked her face. “The Watcher is supposed to watch over the dead, everyone knows that.”

  “Not this last Watcher. This last Watcher has special duties to the livin’ and the dead.”

  “What special duties? Who is it?”

  He wouldn’t meet her eyes. The answer seemed foundered on a technicality that should have had no bearing on compassion or decency or hope. She stood slowly.

  “Well, I guess I can find that out for myself.” And before she swept out the door, stirring a single tentative “woof” from Mr. Billy, she struck a prayerful pose before the small wooden cross on the wall to add sarcastically, “‘. . . and lead us not into communication.’”

  Back across the footbridge she went, leather loafers sucking in and out of mud, wind blasting full in her face. No one had been buried in the churchyard in her lifetime, and none of the weathered tombstones stood out as the newest. Sosanna the child had read the names and talked aloud to the dead in make-believe games but had never paid heed to dates. So many dates! The cream-colored tablets worn nearly smooth were from the 1800’s, and there were remnants of older burials cairns and canting blackened crosses. She could ignore those. The Watcher would be a grave marked, say, thirty years ago.

  So she scanned the polished marble and granite, memorizing the name of a relatively recent candidate until a fresher one came along. She was near the grotto on the seaward side when she sensed the blocking of space behind her, an ambient coolness that matched her own. Without looking up, she said to her mother: “O’Brien . . . Fahey O’Brien, 1973. He’s the Watcher.”

  “Your father doesn’t think so.”

  “Then I’ll keep lookin’.”

  “You won’t find it.”

  “Why not? Isn’t it marked?”

  Her mother was reading gravestones now.

  “Mother?”

  “. . . what?”

  “I asked you if it was marked.”

  “I suppose they are.”

  “They? What do you mean they?”

  “The graves of your father’s other wives.”

  “Mother, you know he didn’t have any other wives. After all these years, why do you keep sayin’ that?”

  “Have I said that before?”

  She had said it for as long as Sosanna remembered. She had said it after storms, and sometimes after high tides, and once when the church bells in Darrig rang for a wedding, and again when the pond mysteriously overflowed and filled the ditch under the footbridge. Her father had told her that her mother’s memory played tricks at times and to just change the subject whenever she had one of her spells.

  “Look, a butterfly!”

  Una glanced at the saffron creature fluttering above Sosanna’s outstretched wrist.

  “If it lands on my hand it means I’ll meet my future husband right here.”

  But the butterfly suddenly left her, beating obliquely up over the pond.

  “Perhaps you aren’t meant to marry,” Una said.

  “Not a very lively looking bunch of candidates anyway,” Sosanna answered with a careless sweep at the graves.

  Later, she returned to the churchyard with a shovel to fill the hole where Moriarty had lately been thrust. His shoes, lightning-scorched and muddied, were apparently embedded upside down in the watery mud. She tried to excavate them with the shovel, but when the blade touched one of the leather soles both sank out of sight. She would have to clamber in to reach them now.

  No thank you.

  She hefted a shovelful of heavy mud from the overhang and when she was about to dump it into the hole, the shoes were back again.

  Damn.

  Why not just bury them? Would Sheelah and Alanna Walsh be grateful for her efforts? No. Still, her father was responsible for all this. Wearily she dropped the shovel and eased herself down into the hole.

  But her weight compressing the fill dirt must have caused the water to rise slightly because now the shoes were gone again. Frustrated at the silliness of what was happening and uneasy at the task, she groped into the water with one hand.

  Where is it? Ah . . .

  She got hold of one shoe. To her surprise it resisted as she tried to straighten. Angrily she plunged the other hand down, feeling for laces that weren’t there, because what came under her fingertips were more like buttons. Though of course it was the mud making things nondescript. She put her back into it, her legs, and that was really odd. Because the suction or whatever was caught on the shoe made the thing absolutely unmovable. And one more thing something that made her straighten and fling the mud from her hands: for just a moment she had the alarming impression that the leather was filled out that there was a foot inside the shoe.

  It was packed tight with mud, of course. And lifting it was like lifting all the mud in the bottom of the hole. But she had had enough of the illusion, and she backed up the slippery sides of the shallow pit and grabbed the shovel. To hell with Moriarty’s shoes. When she was done and coming back past the pond she saw a saffron butterfly sitting atop the pylon, its wings flickering slowly but sharply like awakening breaths.

  EGYPT

  THE GREAT PYRAMID

  6

  He had all kinds of legitimate reasons to go to Egypt. To begin with, he needed to write another book. AIDS was an expensive way to die, and taking care of his mother had hastened the end of the money from 13 Myths that Shape the World just as his publisher stood blank check in hand asking what was he going to do for an encore. Then, too, if he didn’t travel, he would have to go back to the classroom at Willmont College south of St. Paul. No thank you. And, of course, there was the Peruvian stone map that stele which had become his only link with the father he had never known just begging to be investigated by a minor celeb who had drawn first blood as a d
ebunker of scams, myths and frauds.

  He loved the setup of the Peruvian myth. Typically charlatan. Dressing up its outrageous conclusions with real and unexplained phenomena. Because the tunnel business certainly needed delving, and even Professor Gregory “Geezer” Krogman at Willmont agreed that the stele was far older than anything known to have come out of South or Central America. If you ignored that disturbing absurdity of the pyramids, there were certain characteristics in its other symbols that seemed pre-Olmec. In fact it anticipated a number of widely scattered cultures far from Peru. But that was just the point. In its details you were struck by the genuineness of the thing, and yet the impossible combination was so obviously concocted. Someone with the skill to fake such detail must have known the mix wouldn’t fool anyone, as if time and place were irrelevant to its origins. And there was one detail that was plainly over the top. The astonishing precision with which the raised image of the pyramids had been rendered on the stele was unknown to antiquity.

  Under magnification, Lane could even count the courses or rows of casings of what he now was certain was a representation of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The limestone casing stones had been used to smooth the stepped construction of the pyramids into a flat, unbroken exterior. But in actuality the casings no longer existed. Arabs had stripped and cut almost all of them up six hundred years ago to build mosques and temples in Cairo. So even if you accepted that the pyramids were somehow known in Peru, the micro-engraving on a raised glyph, however it was done, could not have been later than that.

  Such a clumsy fake. And that continued to bother him. Was some forger showing off? In fact, it might be forgers in the plural. Because the easiest explanation was that the stele had been revised more than once over many ages. It was as if someone had updated the stone throughout history. Whatever else it was, the stele seemed to be a map. High up on course 191, ninth casing stone in from the eastern edge, south face, there was another image that became clear under intense magnification: Anubis, the jackal-headed god, psychopomp of Osiris the god of the dead. And below it yawned a black rectangle that appeared to be an unknown entrance.