PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “You found gold?” he wheezed.

  “No. Where are the others?”

  “Gone . . .” The Bedouin’s kafiyyah was torn, the headrope wound unevenly. He clung to the wheel as the Pajero accelerated. “Gold?” he repeated in agitation.

  “Gone where?”

  “. . . all gone. You found gold.”

  “No, I told you. Look, we’ve got to get the stone on the pyramid back in place for now. Maybe I’ll search again. It was a very large tomb.”

  “The stone is back, and they are all gone.”

  “You mean they went into the pyramid after me? And now the stone is back? How did it get back?”

  He should have been relieved, but he didn’t like the look Ismael gave him. It was the worried look of a man begging for mercy, and yet Lane posed no threat to him. Whatever had caused the look had already happened, and the Bedouin couldn’t shake it. Ismael began speaking Arabic and whining, rocking against the steering wheel, beating one hand against his chest.

  “What’s the matter with you, Ismael? Are you hurt?”

  The Bedouin’s voice began to oscillate, and Lane couldn’t tell if it was terror or if he was chanting a Muslim prayer. He could see the Great Pyramid now.

  “Are the others inside? Are they in the pyramid, Ismael? We can’t leave them in there.”

  Suddenly the horn was blaring, and Lane braced for a collision. But there was nothing except empty desert in front of them. Then he looked across the seat. The Bedouin lay across the horn, right fist pinned under his chest. Before he even pulled him back, he knew Ismael was dead.

  He saw the blood low on the robe, which was rent from the stomach down, sticky red in the dash lights, black over one of the Bedouin’s sandaled feet. But the Arab’s shock hadn’t come from just loss of blood; there had been that dead look of a man bereft and on automatic, trying to hang onto sanity.

  Lane got out, walked alongside the Pajero, which was still moving slowly, and when he had braced himself enough in the cool desert air, he stopped the vehicle with his hand. Then he opened the passenger door, retrieved the stele from the floor, and wiped his fingerprints guiltily from the door handles.

  He didn’t think his footprints in the sand would leave a coherent trail, didn’t care. He was almost back to the Great Pyramid before he remembered he had pressed his hand firmly on the hood. But why would the authorities check there? They wouldn’t check for fingerprints at all. A humble Bedouin knifed in a fight, found in a car that wasn’t his not the crime of the century.

  Except that the first thing he saw when he reached the south side of the pyramid looked like a pile of bloodied rags twenty or thirty feet from the base. It was Senka. The Nubian had somehow come down from the higher courses but made it no further. Only how could he have climbed down in this condition? The back of his scalp was missing and the bloody pulp of his spine lay open from neck to hip. Lane peered close through the gloom before recognition made him pull back in horror. He thought the body was shattered, as if it had fallen from a great height. But that didn’t explain why it was so far from the base. Could the Arabs have thrown the Nubian clear from near the top of the largest pyramid in the world? Impossible. Impossible for Senka to have been alive and have crawled thirty feet, as well. Ismael must have done it. Killed the bodyguard, or at least dragged him dead this far.

  He should get his Garmin GPS unit from the body, Lane thought, then remembered that Ismael must have had it in the Pajero. He wasn’t thinking clearly, wasn’t being logical. Think, think. He hadn’t killed anyone, just hired them. But he had hired them to help him breach a national treasure without government permits and to bribe guards. Never mind that the system was rife with corruption, that he hadn’t really known if he would find anything to explore when he started out. Things had changed and he had to get out of Egypt; the sooner the better.

  Only, where were the two Sunnis? What if they were trapped inside the passageway? They might be just inside, unable to pull the stone with enough strength and needing someone to push from the other side. And what if he let them out and they decided to kill him? Alternate rescue scenarios played through his thoughts as he climbed the courses. He could leave the passage stone partially closed, allowing them to call out for help when tourists were around. Or he could simply make a phone call when he was safely out of harm’s way. But, of course, then the Giza subcavern would be exploited and he would lose his discovery.

  Why hadn’t he at least anticipated where this might go? He had been so sure that he was disproving something that he hadn’t considered the ramifications if something was proven. The reality was that he wouldn’t have been able to wait for his book to come out before announcing the discovery, because he couldn’t count on silence from the people he had hired. And now this . . .

  Two deaths, and the culprits in at least one of them might be trapped. He kept on climbing. He had to save the Arabs and silently steal away. Good-by discovery. Hello, anonymity. He wondered if his mother would be proud of him. But when at length his line of sight rose above course 191, he was seized with revulsion.

  The other two were dead. They had to be dead. Because wherever the rest of them was it couldn’t be doing well without the internal organs that were lying on the stone. He recognized enough to know that both men were accounted for the Sunnis. Nothing but carrion remained. And that would be gone, too, before the bribed guards returned at full daylight. The first desert birds of prey would catch an updraft and see breakfast lying high up on the Pyramid of Khufu. They would lick their Cheops . . . clean up the mess . . . simplify Lane Andersen’s life and provide a way for him to claim petty fame in the annals of history. He didn’t like it. Didn’t want it. Not that way. He wasn’t sure what he would do with this discovery ultimately or if he wanted the passageway to be opened again. Because he knew where the rest of the Sunnis’ remains must be. They were inside the passageway, behind the stone, which was now back in place just as the Bedouin had said.

  No wonder Ismael was in shock. It must have been horrific. He didn’t quite understand it, but tomorrow he would rationalize that it had to do with religion, tradition, tribal politics. The sacrificial bones he had crunched over deep within the cavern may have had something to do with it, too. A gruesome ritual. Maybe the passageway or another passageway was even known to a sect of Arabs, impassioned guardians of merciless beliefs, and he had somehow gotten them mixed into his ill-advised brew of Sunni, Bedouin and Nubian, and worst of all Anglo-Saxon.

  It was still an imperfect explanation, but the utter and extreme violence of dismemberment he saw there at first light on course 191 of the south face of the Pyramid of Giza could not have been caused by mere sectarian hate. The Bedouin had been the sole survivor. Perhaps the Nubian and the Sunnis had tangled first, and the Bedouin had dealt with reduced odds and finished the job. He remembered the scream and echoes of sheer rage he had heard just after leaving the foul pool, his brain woozy with stench, and now he knew that this carnage was the reason why this was what had been going on inside the passageway. And so now an untidy remnant had been dragged forth and left on display. Who knew what it meant? Or what appeasement to what god it might signify.

  All Lane Andersen knew was that Amen-Ra was glowering at him from the eastern horizon and burning like a knife in his back by the time he returned to the Mena House to check out.

  IRELAND

  CONNEMARA

  9

  Sosanna looked out from the second floor of the house and saw the man swing an object away from the pylon in the middle of the pond. At first she thought he was crouching and aiming a gun at her father, who was bearing down on him like a bulldozer. But the man straightened in the same motion, and the gun became a camera with a telephoto lens and she saw that he was a stranger. You could find unanimity in Darrig over the fitness of her father for execution, but you called those who greeted him with a smile, as this one did, strangers.

  The smile didn’t last long. Her father, galluses hanging loose, wa
s already waving his arms and getting in the young man’s face. The stranger was half a head taller, though, and he moved rather casually in a way that used a grave plot to block the onslaught. Not much of a dresser, she thought: khaki trousers and blue knit shirt, gray running shoes, a black cap notched back from his high brow along with his sunglasses to accommodate the camera. He had “American tourist” written all over him.

  She couldn’t hear the animated argument, of course, except for Mr. Billy’s canine accompaniment, and that was changing from excited barking to a deep-throated growl. Evidently the stranger was giving back. That was unusual for a Yank in Connemara. They came here to recover from stress or to fish or because some imaginative travel agent had convinced them that their ancestral clan was from the west. This one had Scandinavian features and coloring but maybe was not too bright. And the fancy camera said it all. She didn’t see the point of travel photos. Static moments already in the past and never as good as what you got in any vacation brochure.

  However . . . the stranger was standing at the spot very near if not precisely on the spot where the butterfly had nearly landed on the back of her hand not so long ago. What was it she had said to her mother the next day, that she had thought perhaps the butterfly had touched briefly on her wrist and that therefore she would see her future husband standing in the churchyard where it happened? And her mother had replied: “The faeries are full of mischief. You can’t trust sidhe magic to tell you what will happen, only what is possible.”

  Well, this one wasn’t possible.

  ***

  “Insolent lad!” Brone repeated, pointing a finger in Mr. Billy’s face, though he was really talking to Una who was washing dishes in the sink. “I’ve got no right to keep people out of a churchyard, says he. Don’t I, says I. In the first place, it’s my land, and in the second, you’ve got no one takin’ their eternal ease at Thiollaney Merriu, I tell him. Now wouldn’t you think he’d back off? But no, there he was with his bloody camera in my face, sayin’ all he wanted was a closeup of the stone atop the Pillar a pylon, he calls it. Take it from the road, I says. It’s on the blind side, says he. He’s on the blind side himself, I inform him, to which ”

  “Why did he want to take the picture?” Sosanna made her presence known from the other room.

  “Don’t know. So I picked up a bit of moss and stuck it to his lens ”

  “Did he say he was a tourist?”

  “We didn’t discuss his itinerary. Are you interested in the young man?”

  “I was just wonderin’ why you’re so afraid.”

  “Don’t bait me, lass.”

  “You’ve done everythin’ but mount cannon to guard the dead who don’t need guardin’.”

  “Have I?”

  “You have. What’s goin’ to happen when old McReedy dies? Are you goin’ to force them to bury him separate from where his wife lies?”

  “They can move her, if they like. I’ll allow no new graves to be opened. Thiollaney Merriu is full.”

  “That’s not the real reason.”

  “‘Tis the real reason.”

  She looked to her mother, who was washing a broiler pan. Why didn’t she say something?

  “What are you hidin’, father? You’ve got your wife wanderin’ through the stones looking for your other wives, and your daughter wanderin’ among ‘em lookin’ for the Watcher fokkin’ ridiculous. Have you had other wives?”

  “Mind your tongue.”

  “Mind the swearin’ or the question?”

  “The swearin’.”

  “I’m twenty-eight, father, if you don’t like me as I am, I can move to the city.”

  Bored with human voices, Mr. Billy collapsed in a bony heap.

  “Swear like a sailor, if you like. Wouldn’t I walk barefoot over broken glass for you? A father’s for protection, isn’t he?”

  “Have you not noticed the world shrinkin’, father? You can’t keep everythin’ isolated, everythin’ secret.”

  “I’ve kept no secrets from you.”

  “No? Then have you been married before, father?”

  He huffed, the beginnings of a laugh that brought Mr. Billy’s head up from the floor. “What put such nonsense into your head?”

  “It’s easily dismissed.”

  “And not fit for a daughter to raise with her father.”

  “What an astonishin’ thing to say.”

  Later when the gloaming gathered, and she had gone out into the churchyard, he came to her.

  “I’ve asked you not to come out here at this time of day, Sosi.”

  “Am I a trespasser too?”

  “Just this time of day,” he reiterated with a little more steel. “High tide and after sunset.”

  “The ocean is there, and the pond is here, and if the tide makes no difference between them, I don’t see where the danger is.”

  “Do you have to question everythin’?”

  “Apparently I do, since there are so many secrets. Oh, I forgot, you said there are none. Even though you refuse to tell me if you’ve been married before.”

  He sighed heavily. “If I answer that, will you come into the house?”

  “I will.”

  “Then I swear to you that, as I live and breathe, never in this life have I had another wife but your mother.”

  10

  Anubis the jackal-headed psychopomp of Osiris was friendlier, Lane thought. The Irish had their pig-headed tyrants, and the one who owned the churchyard was exhibit one.

  Qualify that to refer to the old churchyard, because there was a new one by the new church, he had been told in Darrig. Few villagers visited Thiollaney Merriu, even to see ancestral graves, it seemed. They feared its spirits and the presence of something utterly malevolent called the Water Wolf. Never mind that the last wolf in Ireland had been shot in 1786. The toothless old codger who rented the “self-catering” cottage to Lane had been keen to tell him how the real last wolf had taken to the sea, and how it had survived by scavenging the dead after funerals at Thiollaney Merriu, and how it sometimes howled from the grotto and left entrails of fresh kill on the rocks or the road. Only, now it was very gaunt and hungry because of Brone McCabe’s ban. Why did people bury their dead in a place with a ghoul wolf in charge, Lane had asked, and the fellow allowed that not everyone believed and that others blamed faerie mischief for the howls and the road kill, because it was a typical cluricaun trick or even the work of the Far Darrig himself. A cluricaun was a sort of deviant leprechaun, and surely the American had heard of the Far Darrig, eh? That was the Red Man, a master trickster. And the town of course was named Darrig. Red. ‘Twas not the red of blood, and certainly not red for the holy Cardinal, but perhaps it was the red of the solitary faeries, as opposed to those who wore green and gathered together in troops, he was told.

  Enchanting village. A hard-drinking village so full of winks and thrown elbows that Lane felt no need, for the moment, to rebut its charming myths. It reached out beyond its village borders to include fishermen, peat bogs, thatched cottages, stone walls, sheep, rattling bikes and rumbling carts on crooked roads. Most of the buildings within its knot of commerce were painted bright white, yellow, red, green or blue and had enameled doors (“varnished,” they called it) to protect the wood from the damp and salt air. And it excited him to know that the churchyard of Thiollaney Merriu had such an intricate and malevolent reputation. Because intricate malevolence hid intricate secrets: juju, grigri, evil totems, cantrips, curses or spells all classic guardians and here in Darrig you had the Water Wolf. Lane Andersen would have been disappointed had he found only rational thought.

  And he was fully signed on now to the possibility of an archaeological link through the steles. Those stone tablets could well be credible evidence of a global culture, or intercultural traffic, far earlier than previously known. Peru had been an anomaly, Egypt a validation, while Ireland established a pattern whose extent was yet to be revealed. But the story he was really after was that a single mythology
or religion had evolved into differing ones, thus showing on a grander scale than ever before just how subjective are man’s constructs of universal truth. He had a vision of himself as a sort of Darwin of theology, uncovering a global archipelago whose island cultures became isolated and eventually selected out mythologies specific to their moral (and immoral) needs. It gave the lie to mankind’s religions; it exposed “truth” as a regional phenomenon.

  The immediate question he needed to answer was how many of these ancient linkages were there. How many sites? He had three in hand, or almost in hand. Deciphering the Hibernian stone map on the third stele was critical. Where would it lead? He felt sure the stele was removable like the one in the Giza cavern, but if he somehow obtained it, that could compromise secrecy before he was ready to publish. It had been there for who knew how many centuries, and it wasn’t going anywhere so long as he didn’t do anything rash to draw attention to it. And besides, if he took it, the curmudgeon who owned the land would guess who had done it. Whatever was here, in the pond or the grotto or the churchyard itself, he needed to verify. Then, perhaps, he could deal with this Brone McCabe, who would probably be happy enough to become world famous and receive payment for excavation rights.

  It could still have elements of a hoax, of course. A modern cryptographer or cult might have contaminated legitimate sites. There was no denying the Khufu Pyramid passageway, but the micro-engraving on the steles was a contradiction he hadn’t solved yet. Steles with an “s,” because that second one had been just as astounding as the Cuzco stone map, so detailed in fact that it had brought him here to the very plot of relevant real estate. That tantalizing outline on the stone that he had been unable to place at first glance had been no trouble for a software program. And the more he had enlarged it on the monitor screen, the more detailed it had become, until the computer match had gone to 99.94% relevancy: a map of Connemara, south of Clew Bay, north of Galway Bay, somewhere between the Twelve Pin Mountains and Killary Harbour. And then there was the second image on the stele, an even finer detail that showed the cliff, the grotto and the pond and even a tiny lupine image, similar to the jackal representation he had found high on the pyramid. It made his Fodor’s tourist map look like crayon scribbles.