PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  But there was no rainbow in sight to cross over, so he turned ninety degrees again, this time to the left, and stuck out his arm and took three steps and just about broke four fingers when they rammed into the wall. That’s what you got when you doubted logic. So while the ache went away, he trailed his thumb lightly against the sooty stone and carried forward in the best tradition of intrepid explorers.

  Thank God for the wall. Thank Pink Floyd. Without the wall he would be lost, lost, lost. Because it seemed to go on forever. A wall with carvings on it. Too bad he couldn’t get a glimpse, even though the pattern seemed to repeat itself at distant points like ritual symbols in an invocation. He didn’t know why he kept losing contact with it every few steps and had to sidle left. Either his arm was shrinking or the wall was curving. Which was strange, because he didn’t remember a hint of curve when he had the light.

  And then there was the gravel that seemed to come underfoot every three minutes or so like clockwork. He kicked it and it rattled away from him, and it wasn’t until the fourth time it happened that he suspected the truth. The ritual symbols weren’t repeating after all, and he hadn’t found his way back to the tunnel wall. He had found an unsettling new dimension. A pillar. An enormous pillar. And he was going around and around . . .

  Stunned, he sagged to his haunches, his hands pressed to the gravel. Only it wasn’t gravel. It was sticks and shells. The sticks were hollow and some of the shells had circles bored through them. Jewelry, he thought. But then his fingers traced a row of smoothly enameled stones fixed in a horseshoe shape that ended in a hinge. He dropped it and jerked to his feet. It was a jawbone. And the hollow sticks were arm bones and leg bones and bones of every sort, all with the marrow missing. Dried out or sucked out or

  What the hell, he had entered a tomb and now there were bones.

  He didn’t like finding them in the dark, that was all.

  With both arms he groped for the pillar, circling until the crunching stopped and his head cleared. Then he exhaled in a huff and slid down with his back to the wall. A giant pillar was holding up a giant . . . what?

  Thoughts weren’t thinking tonight.

  But his senses were almost painfully acute. He thought he smelled water, a faintly bracing dampness in the nostrils that was more than humidity. The longer he sat, the more certain he was. Craning blindly toward a slight movement of air that might have been stirred by water, he began to see faint green splotches that didn’t float away when he blinked. Probably more of the translucent stuff that encased the triangular cartouches with the jackal, he thought. Did it mean another wall? Rising, he pushed away from his only reference point and made for the glow.

  At fifty shuffling steps he gave up counting, but by then the green splotches had become chains of biophosphorescence. It was a mold or fungus, he decided, slowing over the uneven floor so as not to skew his line of vision. Amazing how much illumination you could pick up when your eyes were acclimated to near total darkness.

  Enough to make you stop just short of a sheenless abyss that lay in your path.

  He backed up a step. Vertigo was sweeping over him at the mere thought of a deeper chasm. He mastered it, and that was when he discerned a robed figure that seemed to be floating on a level with him not more than fifty feet ahead. The abyss encircled it as if it were on a pedestal or an island.

  “Hello?” he called softly.

  An obelisk might look like that, wider at the bottom. The smell of water was very strong. He knelt down to extend his hand in the abyss and not unexpectedly found a pool. The thing out there in the middle was a statue or a pylon. Again he shook the flashlight with no result. But he was quite sure now: the dark object rising from the water was

  man-made.

  That thinking beings had come and gone from this place was reassuring. It meant the upper world was not so far away. There had to be ways in and out from before the pyramid was built. Apprehensive but hopeful, he contemplated swimming out to see if there were carvings or images that might guide him back to the desert surface. If men had placed the thing there, it bore investigation. Of course, a pool could hold anything, and ancient Egyptian cultures were known for lethal surprises. But behind him lay a field of bones so old they were hollow. Nothing could have survived to greet the modern era. Whatever danger had once existed here, it was part of a vanished millennium. He pulled off his shoes.

  His feet never found the bottom, and he swam breastroke, keeping his head above the surface. He was a good swimmer, but the liquid was insubstantial somehow. When he stopped to tread, he was mystified by the lack of buoyancy. And the water was warmer than the air against his naked body. What did that mean? Surely there was no volcanism in this part of the world. Sculling and pedaling, he raised up enough to stare down into the water, and to his surprise crimson glints winked back from far below him. For just a moment he entertained the absurdity that he was floating above lava seams, but then he picked up a telltale pattern. The crimson bursts were moving, circling. Circling him. Luminous jellyfish, he thought, medusas or lanterneyes. He had read about glowing bacteria on the organs of transparent fish in the Gulf of Oman. Usually this occurred at extreme depths where no light could reach and life resorted to exotic metabolisms. But the utter darkness here explained the adaptation. What else had survived in this forsaken region, he wondered, suddenly spooked. Finishing his transit with a dozen hard strokes, he hauled himself up on a coarse rock shelf that felt more like sharkskin than stone.

  The pylon was three-sided and peaked a couple of feet above his reach. He slogged dripping around it once, drawn to the single object that interrupted the smooth surface at the top of the side facing the green glow. Fear for his predicament abated as his curiosity stirred. It was a stele, but instead of the ovoid shape of an Egyptian cartouche, it was rectangular like the one from Peru.

  He understood the significance, that this could be the conclusive link between two cultures an ocean apart. Even if he dismissed the map that had brought him here as information a single traveler could have taken to Peru, this second stele if it was like the first challenged global history. He should have been elated, but the similarity between his father’s final hour and his own dilemma drifted like a cloud over his excitement. Rollie Andersen had penetrated a secret place, a subterranean place, and come out with a stele and died violently soon after. At least that was the tale his mother had offered him in place of a father.

  My father is a myth . . . just like all the other myths I expose.

  He pulled himself up the rough pylon high enough to touch the raised glyph and was startled when the stone moved slightly.

  An eerie concord pricked his heart as he realized there might be more truth to what his mother had told him than he had thought. His father hadn’t gotten away with his stele, if you believed that part of the story. Easier to believe that his mother had made it up to console herself. Any woman might do that. Pregnant, the baby comes, a father disappears how very painful to deal with. And his mother had a history of using fantasies, drugs and dreams to deal with pain. For her, all reality was subject to interpretation. So, nothing would happen if the son of Rollie Andersen took this stele off now. But he certainly wouldn’t do it just to prove something about his father. There were more important things to prove. He fingered the stone edge, tested the bond, and to his astonishment it popped off as if it had been magnetized.

  The surrealism of what happened next postponed all feeling, all analysis. A sudden hiss, like carbonation coming to the top of a glass, broke the surface of the pool. With it came a stench that seared his throat and set his eyes watering. He gagged and pawed his face. Delaying further was out of the question now. Clutching the stele, he slipped back into water that felt foul and struck out vigorously, half frog kicking, half paddling with the stele. The crimson glints below him were probably magnified by his splashing, but they seemed to be coming together. And like the eyes of the jackal in the translucent prisms, they moved with him. He reached the far rim and
rolled out onto the rough stone, heedless of scrapes as he drove himself to one knee.

  Chest heaving, he scuttle around until he found his clothes, and by then a virtual light show was stirring the depths of the pool. The rankness of the air ate into his perceptions as he dressed and slipped into his shoes. In fact as he fled, glancing backward, he thought he saw a preposterous silhouette. The suggestion must have come from the totem he had seen on the wall (that and the association he had made with the Egyptian god Anubis) because it looked fleetingly and startlingly like the head of an immense jackal bursting from the pool. But he was so faint and so far from the dim fungal glow that backlit the pylon that he knew it could not possibly be real.

  The apparition vanished in a tease of splotches that seemed to flow away from him. Seconds later he was jarred by shrill cries dissolving in a tumultuous roar. For just a moment he anthropomorphized the Anubis phantom into something it wasn’t. But, of course, the uproar must have been human voices colliding with their own echoes. The Nubian and the Arabs had probably reached their limit of coexistent; the latter were coming after him and his bodyguard was trying to stop them.

  Going back now would be foolhardy. The odds had been bad to begin with, and they would be worse by the time he got there. If the Arabs had betrayed him before he was separated from his bodyguard, they might have stood a chance. Now he had to find another escape. In the emptiness ahead of him there were only two choices: the hemisphere of black oblivion or the minor firmament of green nebulae that backlit the pool. However sickly the light, it was still light, he decided. Pulling at the damp clothes that hampered his movements, he plodded after it, one hand still clutching the stele.

  The voices were not raised again and he began to think that they were not going to catch up to him. But then, depending on what lay ahead, he might eventually have to go back. If he could find his way back. How long would they wait, if they couldn’t find him first? He had no doubt that if it came to returning the way he had come, the entry stone would be back in place high up on the pyramid.

  Somewhere in his awkward flight it came upon him that a part of him was enjoying this. Clutching history in one hand, lost and possibly doomed to a slow death in an unknown necropolis, he had never felt so alive. It was almost a game in which he could not regret the outcome. If he died and met his mother, he would tell her: “I was right about the tunnels, they didn’t go anywhere. No international subway to Miami Beach. Strictly local stations. Sorry, Mom.” He could face physical extinction, but he didn’t want to be wrong about the past.

  Not until the suffocating stench that had followed him from the pool at last left his lungs and his mind started to clear did he grasp another change. The floor was angling up. He was leaning forward to keep his balance. Huffing with exertion, he began to navigate by keeping his steps on the incline. For awhile he continued his rapid pace, heedless that he might walk off the rim of a chasm or into another unannounced pool of whatever liquid leached out of these subterranean depths, but as the fungal chains grew thinner and less frequent, he deliberately slowed. Which probably saved him from fracturing a knee or an elbow. Because almost immediately he stumbled on the steps.

  Different steps.

  A flight of them much steeper than before. And if he thought it had been dangerous coming down, flashlight in hand, now he had to climb as if on a ladder to keep from pitching backward in the darkness. He took the brunt against his left knee, hip and arm, protecting the stele on his right side; and his shirt, which had begun to dry, became soaked again. Endlessly he climbed, bracing and pushing until his legs grew heavy, then rubbery.

  He should have been relieved at the first sign that he had reached desert level, but when his fingers encountered something crisp and papery several inches long his blood surged icily. It was a shed skin, segmented and with an upward sweep at the end. He knew exactly what it was. Things that hunted on the surface of Egypt’s barren wastes burrowed just underneath it. Welcome to the nursery of the scorpion.

  Lots of people died of scorpion stings in Egypt. Usually the spiders blundered into human environments, and if they couldn’t get away when you stepped into your boot or pulled back the sheet in the dark, you got to run red lights all the way to the hospital. That was the optimistic scenario, because the hospital probably had the means to save you. But if you came to see the scorpions in their homesteaded tomb, all nice and dark and sealed off doctor-free, you could count on becoming a statistic.

  “Just passing through . . . don’t get up,” he warned in a murmur, hoping the deadly creatures weren’t deaf and would scurry away from any sound.

  He moved very slowly while trying to span several steps at a time, listening hard for the fandango of spider feet in multiples of eight. His fingers tingled, the hair on his arms lifted. If he accidentally cornered a scorpion, a sting would be inevitable. But when the touch finally came, it wasn’t on his extremities. It was on his scalp.

  He jerked back reflexively, pawing at his hair. And when he was sure one of the creatures hadn’t buried its lethal dagger in him, he crouched there in the darkness, thinking it through. The nest would be close to the desert floor, close to where it hunted, and so he had probably only brushed against a ceiling. Probably. Hating the uncertainty, he carefully extended cold, clammy fingers higher and higher until, almost like an electric shock, he encountered rough stone.

  The surge of adrenaline left his heart pounding with another small triumph. But it was the wrong time to dwell on victory, and he quickly determined that a carved block rested on the slant overhead. A stone stop held it on a stone ramp. He could feel the smooth twin tracks rising above it. The block was small, the mechanism crude. You pushed the block up the ramp, exposing whatever the opening led to, and when you passed through, the block slid back down against the stone stop.

  Methodically he braced his feet on the steps, and in the process found cuts in the sidewalls. They were too close to the block for his knees to fit, too wide to have been fashioned for someone his size. He pulled back puzzled. Ancient Egyptians were supposed to have been shorter than present day races, but no one had said they were wider. And then he was pushing with his legs and his shoulder, and when the block broke free and grated a few inches up the tracks, he got his left hand on the end and straight-armed it all the way up.

  Cool night air soothed his face, and he looked down at a blue desert that seemed to throb after his long ordeal in near total darkness. He could not see the sky or any part of the horizon, just that patch of phantom blue fifteen or twenty feet below. His left arm began to tremble with the weight of the small block. Either he had to drop through the opening or let the stone slide back. Sand, he told himself, it’s just sand. Crabbing his feet over the edge, he let go and fell.

  8

  The rumble reached him before he impacted. It was the block reseating itself against the stop, but the solid concussion sound made his landing seem harder than it was. He sank five or six inches into the soft dune, twisting both ankles as he rolled to the side. The jar knocked the tablet loose, but it merely toppled unharmed a few feet away, joined by the little yellow Garmin Rino, which shot out of his breast pocket. Above him an extensive ridge of limestone was framed against the starry night.

  Scarcely smaller than the formation from which the Sphinx had been carved, the feature cut off fully half his view, and yet he should have seen at least some of the Giza Plateau’s prominent landmarks against the relative brightness of the open desert. How far could he have come underground? He retrieved the stele, confirming that it bore the same strange mix of raised glyph and finely etched detail as the Peruvian stone. Then he picked up the Rino GPS radio unit and saw that it was on.

  Had the fall jarred it to life, or had it been transmitting all along and he had simply not been able to pick up a return transmission underground? He shut it off while he weighed the consequences of getting in touch with Senka, his Nubian bodyguard. The shouts and commotion he had heard in the cavern meant he couldn’t c
hance meeting the Arabs again. And the odds that the Nubian was still functioning and in possession of the other radio seemed remote.

  Lane trudged through the sand until he outflanked the limestone outcropping, and still there was no Giza profile, no Sphinx. There were distant dwellings and, he thought, a road, though the open desert was painted in shifting shades of night blue. He guessed he was south of Giza in the direction of Sakkara, but he couldn’t see the Step Pyramid of Djoser either, which meant he was somewhere in the middle of the thirteen kilometers that separated those two pyramid sites. He glanced pointlessly at his compass, turned north. But it didn’t really matter, because before he had traveled very far he distinguished a plume of dust coming toward him.

  It was the Mitsubishi Pajero that belonged to the Sunnis. His damn Garmin had been on and they had taken the unit from his bodyguard and located him. No point in being coy now. Too late to hide the stele. He would give them his money, tell them the truth about the passageway, pretend the stele was a disappointment. He would bluff about how many people knew what he was doing and would soon be looking for him, and he would tell them lies about having more cash back in his hotel room where he had only traveler’s cheques. He hoped they hadn’t been too rough on Senka.

  But the Sunnis weren’t coming. It was just Ismael, the Bedouin, at the wheel. No one else was in the vehicle. When Lane opened the door and the dome light came on, the Arab seemed to stare straight through him. His deeply burned face looked leaden and his beard had spittle on it. He coughed as Lane got in, coughed softly like a weak starter trying to catch.