PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  She didn’t know what she wished.

  He inched along on the tractor mower, tracing endless configurations around footstones and fieldstones and clay tablets and the two mausoleums, or else he weeded the plots, or straightened the iron fence, or probed for a sunken gravestone, or dug up a root that was stressing an old schist marker, all the while keeping an anxious eye out for her next sojourn to the vast and unfathomable realm to the west of the grotto.

  She swam naked. Her body had changed little since the pregnancy with Sosanna, and there were boys who spied on her in certain small bays, she knew, and more than one fisherman kept binoculars in the binnacle and had a story to tell. She knew the tides and the currents and used them both to achieve solitude, going with either to places a boat avoided.

  She still thought about the pregnancy. It was more of a demarcation in her life than even motherhood would suggest. It was a border within her nature. She had come back that day nearly thirty years ago not just to save her husband from his grave, but because she knew she carried a child within her. Poor Brone. A miserable swimmer, and yet he had pursued her, believing she was leaving him and that she had gone into the pond. She had been in one of her restless states, and he should have known that it would pass it had to pass. But she did have a yearning almost a compulsion to wander, and her horizon just happened to be an ocean. Yet as many times as she had left, she always came back, and when he learned that she was pregnant he was more secure about her remaining at Thiollaney Merriu than he had ever been before or since.

  How careful she had been during that pregnancy! She had worn the amulets and practiced the charms, avoided spinning or tying things, lest the umbilical cord strangle the fetus, was careful not to step over a baby’s grave the whole term, and even made the “groaning cake” herself the day of her confinement, though there was no one in the household to eat it for luck except she and Brone and, in the last hour, the midwife. She had done a hundred things to ensure that the babe was born without blemish or affliction.

  The only thing she had balked at was the “churching.” But Brone had been fearful of what would happen if she did not go first to church for purification after the birth. They had never been to church, she had protested, the villagers would not welcome him after so long a lapse. The truth was she had no connection with God through a religion. But her husband had been anxious to follow all the proper protocols of Connemara. It was one of the changes that had come over him since his day in the grave and with what it acquainted him with under the churchyard. He feared Thiollaney Merriu like a person who suddenly discovers the danger of falling down a long flight of steps in their very house. He feared the grotto and the pond and especially the Pillar. So she had read the Bible at his insistence, specifically Revelation, specifically the latter days and about the Angel of the Bottomless Pit and the Lake of Fire, and he bought a spring lamb and took her out in the woods and they sacrificed the hapless thing on a makeshift altar. It was ghastly, but she had considered it preferable to being “churched” in the village.

  The tractor engine was suddenly running at the same pitch, as if the machine had paused. He must have seen her slipping into the grotto, and now he was watching, hoping she would reappear, that she was just out for a quick breath of air or to gather some of the heather that grew on the lee side. If he had not seen her, she could have counted on a few hours perhaps before he came in and found her missing. Now she decided to make the swim short, and so she worked her way barefoot through the nettles and the sand leading down from the south side of the precipice.

  She did not often swim the unpredictable waters directly off the cliff. The shape of the bottom with its rises, bars and channels did strange things to tides and currents. The latter might circle or reverse or collide in a whirlpool. Most dangerous of all, the tide could drive against the cliff with an incredible surge. Especially at high tide. Then you could hear the honeycomb passageways wail like panpipes at a frenzied dance of the sidhe. Indeed, the water could boom like thunder or drum exactly like mortals lured by sidhe into an eternal dance. It always unnerved her when the sound took that form as the tide coursed through the pocketed labyrinthine channels. Her hearing was as keen as Mr. Billy’s for certain sounds, particularly those that came from under land or sea. And the drumming made her think of the marching dead.

  She dropped her shift on the largest of the flat stones there, danced across a natural jetty of a dozen more boulders, and dove cleanly through the next frothy swell.

  She had felt the resonance through the stones on the soles of her feet, smelled the essence of soluble life, tasted the salty tang on the wind, heard the thud and murmur of land and water in eternal negotiations for the shore. Water always won. Water was stronger than earth, because it was literally fluid, adaptable, multiformed. It subsumed, it incorporated, dissolved, digested. And now it reconstituted Una McCabe. She was like the lichens clinging to the earth but waiting for the benediction of water. Down, down she went, hugged by cool green, caressed with every supple turn she executed. Shadows schooled aside for the currents she made and the eddies she left. Predators read her speed and configuration, the timid locked into their defensive postures, the curious rode pressure changes as they finned in her wake. The bi-directional world yielded to infinite dimensions, gravity eased, sounds muted. For just this hour she would be insulated and freed in her protean element.

  It was in water that she ceased feeling she had somewhere else to go, in water where she no longer felt compelled to search, in water where she was in touch with herself and the universe. She had known for the first time that she was pregnant when she swam. Had felt quite distinctly the small collection of cells in her womb. Throughout her term, whenever she had returned to the sea, she crooned underwater, knowing that the sound would carry to her baby in a special way, not just sound but vibration tamped by the quiddity of life’s origins on earth. She had even considered a water birth, though in the end she had yielded to her husband’s narrow provisions with the midwife and the amenities of the house.

  She was looking up at the lime-tinctured sky as she rose toward the surface when she saw it. A black rectangle. It floated above her like a boat, except for the angles of the corners. Just before she breached the swell, she saw the handle along the side and knew what it was. She sculled frenziedly as she stared at it, as if she had suddenly lost her buoyancy in surprise. But then she stroked to one end and positioned the thing around so that she could push as she kicked into shore. There was air in it, but it couldn’t float indefinitely, and she had no idea how long it had been out here.

  When it grated onto the sand, she ran back toward the cliff, grabbing her shift, and when she reached the top of the rise she pulled the garment on and waved at Brone until she caught his eye. He shut down the mower, hastened toward her.

  “It’s a coffin,” she said with urgency, nodding behind her.

  He looked with horror and saw. She followed him, falling behind. It had dislodged and was turning slowly in the shallows when he waded out and towed it further up the beach by the handle.

  “Where . . . where was it?” he grunted in disbelief between tugs.

  “There. Right there.” And she pointed out beyond the surf.

  He scanned the cliff at the waterline but saw nothing. It had come through one of the many honeycombed passages below the surface.

  “It’s a warnin’,” she said.

  “Very ineffective way to deliver a message, would you say?” he replied hastily, staring out at the ocean now. “It could’ve floated to Dingle Bay before it come ashore or sunk at sea.”

  “Maybe there’s more.”

  “No. It’s the last one from the plots near the grotto.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do. I should’ve moved it when I moved the others ten years ago.”

  “It’s too new. It’s metal.”

  “Not that new.”

  “It’s a warnin’,” she repeated. “It’s started.”

/>   “What’s started? Nothin’s happenin’.”

  “There’s turmoil down there.”

  “There’s nothin’ happenin’, I tell ya. We’re gonna have to drag this up. I’ll get a rope.”

  They worked feverishly for ten minutes getting it to a point where it could be loaded on a wagon and pulled by the tractor. Brone hid it under a weighted tarp for the time being while he surveyed the site by the grotto. He would have to raise the sunken grave pits, reset the headstones, he decided. Then he went off to dig a new grave far from the pond, avoiding Una’s gaze as he worked.

  She walked slowly around the edge, staring deep within the depths. She had always been able to see far down in the water, even water as black as this much farther than other humans. And there were her weedy castles the ones she had described to Sosi as a child with their weedy green walls and their weedy green battlements. And now there was something else, she thought. Rectangles. Four or five of them. All in a jumble. Probably wooden, because they had filled with water and sunk. Or perhaps they had never risen at all.

  17

  “Mad Darby, Mad Abban, Mad Macloy, Mad Cooney, Mad Brone and his mad daughter Mad Sosanna . . .” Lane ranted into his hand-help digital recorder as he plodded north along the yielding sands of the beach south of Thiollaney Merriu. “Connemara is an asylum for the culturally insane . . . culturally insane,” he repeated when a large wave finished crashing. “I thought all that wee folk stuff was a tourist gimmick until I came here, but it’s really in their psyche like a . . . like a communal alter ego. It goes beyond the Irish pub, and you can’t just chalk it up to rural boredom. I could see it in their faces at that stupid talk I gave last night. They looked at me like I was trying to take away Christmas. Except for Doreen Brynn. But she wasn’t born here. It must be something in the water . . .”

  Sand pipers seemed to be running a relay against him, or maybe it was just one, sprinting in level bursts across the empty beach like a chain of dashes on a blank page.

  He zipped his digital recorder into his backpack and hooked his thumbs into the straps. It was a good kilometer and a half to the cliff of Thiollaney Merriu along the beach. He was timing it for the supper hour, hoping the McCabes (especially the dog) would be in the house. The horizon out over the North Atlantic was a wash of white light, as if nature had run out of colors in mid-painting. He squinted up the beach. The seaweed was curled in long chains, like Arabic writing penned by the last tide’s reach. But just as he was approaching the rise of the cliff, he came upon an odd furrow that bisected it. It ran right into the water or out of it. Too narrow for a boat, whatever it was that had been dragged up or down had left its mark after the last tide.

  At the top of the rise he surveyed the churchyard. Except for the gluey gold arc on the eastern edge that caught the late light of day, the pond was as still and black as before. No one was about. The drag mark he had followed from the beach ended where tractor tracks began, and some distance away he saw freshly turned earth hidden from the road by a tarp. Undoubtedly Leprechaun gold salvaged in a chest from the Spanish Armada, he mused, but he already had his quest. Keeping to the seaward slope, he rose and scampered to the grotto forty yards away.

  Up close it looked contrived somehow. Boulders and arches and a maze of channels that could have been designed on a Hollywood set. The impression grew when, crossing a dry basin and squeezing between two gray sarsen stones, he was confronted with the proverbial three choices of passageways. Right is right and left is wrong . . . he recalled from some childhood game and chose the far right opening around a blue-gray monolith. Two more branches immediately presented themselves, but he could see where the other routes merged back in again, having merely circled the formations. Mad Darby must not have been a boy scout, he thought, because you couldn’t possibly get lost in this grotto. Either you would reach the sea, or return to where you started from, or in desperation you might have to climb to the top of the boulders to get a bird’s eye view of your position.

  He said.

  And then he sidled through a series of drop steps and became enlightened. Because in front of him yawned a taffy pull of stone riddled with holes big enough for a human to pass through. The maze was three-dimensional. He was unfamiliar with any geologic process that could have produced such erosion, as if soft stone had suddenly cooled in the act of pulling apart and then been worn smooth by flowing water.

  It was foreboding, but he had come here for this, hadn’t he? The angles were not so steep as to prevent him from working his way back up, and they all seemed to slant seaward, which meant he would not end up in some chthonic world below the grotto as he had beneath the Giza plateau. No time for a faint heart. His pack cushioned progress as he wormed his way feet first into the largest of the holes.

  He had read enough history to know that this area of Ireland had been geologically stable for a long time. But whatever had coursed through here must have been swift and inexhaustible to carve so clean a path, while the shapes hinted at earlier processes related to magma. The entire cliff could have been upthrust from the sea floor.

  Two or three body lengths in, small pits began to snag his backside and the bottom of his pack. The shaft was becoming a Swiss cheese. And then his heels slipped and dangled through a large opening. There was still enough light to see that the level below was exactly the same. Did he want to drop down? He did. Up was up. He could always go up.

  So now he found himself in a deeper, darker layer, craning to see down his nose past his feet. The light that that had filtered after him through offset holes was quickly diminishing. Yet another descent offered a lower channel was it the third? and he struggled his pack around so that he could pull out his flashlight. A little claustrophobia was setting in, but you couldn’t suffocate in Swiss cheese. He flicked on the switch, and the effect was to darken the porous fall of light from above. The only thing he could clearly see was the smooth gut of the channel beyond his hiking boots, as if he had entered the digestive tract of a great stone animal.

  He didn’t liked tightly closed places. Once, when he was eleven or twelve and living among the free spirits his mother had abandoned him to, he had been sent to check on the “nursery.” The nursery was the bus they had all traveled in, and it must have been close to a hundred degrees that day, and he found the infants dizzy and crying, their hair spiky with sweat, their clothes soaked and smelling of urine. There were flies crawling on the windows trying to get out, and the children themselves were like flies in a bottle. But what had shocked him most was the dehydrated baby strapped to the papoose board. She may have been dead already. Dead only minutes, because her squinched-up face was still black with blood, like a shrunken head from the Amazon interior. He remembered the frantic efforts to revive her and the empathy he had felt. And he recognized something else about himself now from that experience in the hermetic bus, stale with homegrown weed and incense. It was why as a boy he hadn’t like being hugged, or smothered in a pillow fight, or buried in a pile playing “King of the Mountain.” And it was why he suddenly felt insulated in stone in a burying ground in Connemara, Ireland, sixteen years later.

  An adjacent channel opened up through a vertical hole in the sidewall to his right, and because it was slightly larger, he slid across. But it quickly narrowed again. Narrowed and grew steeper. Not fair.

  Mad Darby, Mad Darby, Mad Lane Andersen . . .

  He hated this. Time to stop. But, of course, quitting meant failure. He would either have to try again or give up his quest altogether. Give up on the book. By default, his mother’s version of a mystical world would be vindicated.

  He squeezed through another connection into a larger channel, though it meant dropping down a level. But the stone tubes were bending like soda straws, and he felt himself sliding, unable to wedge his shoes or bend his knees or drag his free hand hands, because the flashlight he had been holding went clattering away into nothingness. It was Chutes and Ladders, and he was in a chute.

  He was
free falling, and it seemed in the blackness that he had fallen from the earth itself. But quicker than you could say “Mad Darby,” his feet struck terra firma again and he pitched forward, catching himself on his palms before his face could strike rock. And there was his flashlight, not even broken, throwing a loop of light along a cavern floor.

  It was the smell that registered first. A mephitic, stifling smell, fainter than at the black pond in the pillared cavern beneath Giza, but once you knew it, any whiff was enough to reconstitute the full potency in your mind. The flashlight found nothing to explain it. A small cavern that was all. Smooth like the layered channels above him and featureless, except for the two things in the floor. Two pits. Larger than the holes he had come through, but different because they were fimbriated, as if the rims had been thrown up by the stress of something pushing through.

  Side by side, they reminded him of termite tubes or lairs in an ocean bed out of which sea worms sprang with choreographed precision to wave and dance. And the

  deep-earth smell, dank and invested with hints of the most elemental rotting, that too gave him a vermicular feeling. Casting the light upward, he saw that the multiple channels were a scaled down version of the twin pits: parallel burrows, though smaller and more prolific. There in the surreal cast of the smooth cavern, his imagination took it a step further. What if this was some kind of birthing chamber? A nest. Ridley sea turtles came ashore to lay their eggs; and other more amphibious designs were common. The two large pits and the smaller escape channels above looked very much like a reduction valve. Why couldn’t unknown eel-like titans of the sea make their way here to spawn or incubate offspring, which then made their way to the surface or perhaps the burial ground through a network of smaller tubes? (Because they would have to burrow through stone . . . that’s why!) But what if