PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  The pond lay thick with secrets, black and slightly rounded. She stared at it for fully a minute while leaning on the prow, her heart pounding. How odd it looked. She retrieved her sketchpad, tossed the oars out, and flipped the hull over so that it wouldn’t fill with rain. And that caused her to hiss aloud in dismay. Because the upturned hull was raked with fresh parallel gouges from one end to the other.

  22

  The Mists of Ionarbadh . . . marchin’ . . .

  BS. Blarney Stone. BullShit.

  . . . it just may be that a man of reason such as yourself, after puttin’ aside his unreasonable fears of a harmless pillow . . .

  That was the only true thing Abban had said. One solitary veracity out of a vigintillion lies. Everything else was a tease, half-truths, connivery, a swaying bridge that connected the vast Hibernian delusion to reality. And if Lane Andersen threw the pillow from the bed to the floor, he would be retreating before that delusion. So he did not. It was a damn good pillow, not too soft, not too firm. And green. Green was good, despite what Kermit the Frog claimed. Green was money. Green was Irish clover.

  He slept on the Dream Pillow, and the theater screen in his mind remained dark all night. He knew it had because when he awoke he was deeply rested and all things were in equilibrium. No ripples, no stabs of light, no running in place before the onrushing tiger. Sleep had been a window shade pulled down, and when it went up there was the usual mist.

  Or maybe not the “usual” mist, but so what? Call it a mighty mist. Still, hardly a major miracle in the Connemara district. Nevertheless, he took his time shaving, brushing his teeth and dressing so that the sun had a little more time to burn off the white wool and expose the village unscathed. He had put the Dream Pillow nonsense to bed, so to speak, and he was eager to see a very ordinary dawn melt the mist melt the myth. But when he opened the door and saw how really thick and dead still the stuff was, he said: “Jeez Louise.”

  The Mists of Ionarbadh.

  Okay, okay, Abban. So you got your killer mist. Not exactly a long shot prediction considering you didn’t really pin down which morning it would happen on. I’m glad it was today, because now I can disprove the rest of what you said. If there was another living soul about, I would talk to him only because you told me not to; but since there isn’t, I’ll just walk toward the cliff, because there’s nothing there not a damn thing.

  It was the right attitude. But after only a dozen yards the vapor cut him off at the knees, and he knew the mist was touching more than his body. He breathed it in and it prowled through his emotions and his memories as if they were on display at a garage sale. Like an invasive physical, it collected him in bits his mind in bits the doubts, the issues, psychological antibodies from old traumas. And then he felt empty again.

  And now that his dramatic content had been plagiarized, a scene-setting commenced. Major constructions stirred just out of sight. Dead air moving. A hidden stage crew lifted flats, plugged in a light board. Lobsterscope over the spot, periactoid in the wings. He could smell the greasepaint, hear the emptiness filling in. Places, everyone! And when Lane Andersen hit the cobblestones, he knew he had stepped upon a stage.

  He tried to veer away from the lambent light, but the mist seemed to usher him back with cold caresses. A deep foreboding grew step by step. If matter and energy were crossing each other’s borders here, he did not want to enter. But as he drew nearer, the glow resolved itself into a dozen lancet windows spaced evenly on the facade of a large edifice of stone. It was a crude church or something monastic. Something spiritual. Something communal.

  He was twenty paces from a black recessed doorway when he heard the first cry: limberlost, bereft, unanchored, articulating nothing in the human language, communicating everything of human sorrow. And as it died there came an antiphonal murmur, something less organized than a human chant but not quite animal. Lowing. Tremulous and tearful.

  It was a wake, he decided. Someone lay dead on a long deal table with pennies over their eyes, and that was why the wailing was so uncanny. Oh, the Irish and their funerals! This one would be the whole shebang, everything he had read about Hibernian burial customs, because, of course, it was his dream. He must accept that. He was still asleep on that herb-redolent Dream Pillow, and if he could believe any of the characterizations Abban had made about it, then his subconscious was feeding into the tableau in some way. And, again according to Abban, the dreamer had some control over the direction of things. Not a lot, of course, the old scamp had said. So make it a roaring funeral, worthy of a lively corpse, one that would be buried with his clay pipe and his fiddle, and a groat in his mouth to “pay his footing” in eternity, and even with a hammer near his hand, as was sometimes placed in Irish coffins so that the dead could beat on the gates of Purgatory.

  The lancets were limned crimson and framed a flickering interior that must have been candlelit. But another ten steps and he was hit with such a stench that he knew there were no quarrels of glass within the grillework. Could a corpse be in such condition for its funeral?

  Mere decomposition of one cadaver would not account for it. It was too foul, too pervasive. Where were the flowers and incense? Again the aberrant cry filled a hollow space on the other side of the stone facade, triggering a mad counterpoint of hacking and hoarseness and moans. This was not the keening of funereal celebrants.

  Against every instinct he pressed closer to the lancets until he was standing in a gutter that ran along the edge of the building. His vision now level with the sill, he was obliged to rise up on his toes. And as he did so, a bony hand shot out of the wall just above the gutter and caught his ankle. He had a quick impression of filthy nails and knuckles crusted with sores before he was fighting to pull himself away, as if the wiry hand would drag him through the wall. Each time he lifted his foot, he was yanked off balance, and so he planted both feet and braced himself the length of his forearms.

  Scuppers were spaced all along the stone façade, evidence that the insides of this unholy place were washed down regularly. The skeletal hand had shot out through one of these. Again he kicked his imprisoned foot, flexing his toe against the underside of a wrist, but seemed to make no progress. And suddenly the ragged nails let go, reappearing an instant later wrapped around the grillework of a glassless lancet.

  An anxious eye peered out, a single perfect eye, glossy and clean, the last outpost of purity in a damaged face. Lane recognized the plea in the eye even before the man delivered his babble of entreaties. The harsh voice might have been Irish, but it had a choppiness dissimilar to what he had heard over the last few days. In any case, he was forced to rear back from the blast of fetid breath that overpowered even the stench of the place. Recovering himself on the other side of the gutter, he rose on tiptoes again to gather a fresh impression of what was within.

  But there was nothing fresh about what he saw. It looked very much like a stable dotted with what must have been human excrement in scattered mounds of straw. A single massive table stretched for perhaps a third of the unpartitioned room, which could have been sixty feet square. There were gray bowls and pots on the table, and others tipped over on the floor, and a kind of font or stone basin flush with one of the flanking walls. Most horrible, were the two-dozen living if living could be used prisoners because prisoners must be used of the place.

  More than half sat on the straw; the rest crouched or paced or lay in attitudes of misery and pain. One curled naked on the table. Another rocked foot to foot. A woman crept steadily along the wall by the basin, running her fingers over the stone. Two more were tethered to the opposite wall with heavy linked chains and shackles. Curiously, all of them occupied only the near half of the room.

  That was striking. Half the room. It took Lane a few seconds to realize that. The far recesses of the ghastly chamber were empty except for the end of the table and a few wisps of straw that hadn’t been culled to the near side. There was nothing at the far extreme. Just a darkness in the floor whose details he could
not discern. Perhaps it was a midden full to capacity with wastes, and that was why the internees crowded away from it. Even the chained figures had stretched their forged tethers to the limit in the opposite direction.

  Had Lane not been standing in neutral light the dismaying scene might not have been so vivid. By contrast from where he stood orange incursions flickered up and across a beamed ceiling from a kind of raised trough stretched along the basin wall. An iron cage guarded the trough. The smoky pall indicated that the contents might be burning peat, though the appalling reek of ammonia and ordure masked its odor.

  Three more fingers twined into the grillework of the lancet, and Lane was brought back to the wretched plea before him. The fellow’s toothless mouth worked oddly, lower jaw extended as if full of bile that might spill over if he dared enunciate clearly. No teeth and one eye and, lucklessly, the wits to know what freedom was.

  “Do you speak English?” Lane’s question was inane, because whatever this place was, it was a far cry from the tropes and colloquia of the “English” he knew. But he repeated it, as if to evoke some pidgin compromise that could put them in sync. He got back the same soulful plaint as before.

  So much agony. Once, when Lane had driven through a neighborhood in Rochester, New York, a beagle had rushed barking after his car. He had hit the brakes, but the young dog tangled with the wheel well and the fender, and when he got the car stopped and ran back, the poor thing was gurgling out its last. The animal’s paws had tensed spasmodically like the whitened fingers of this man behind the grille, and there was the same white look of fear and surprise in its eyes, as if to ask why. It was too damaged to live. Too horrible to linger in the eyes of the living. The wretch the wretches before Lane now seemed similarly stricken.

  Suddenly the man twisted his neck and, emitting another cry, leapt back from the window. With the nervous agility of the half-starved, he threw himself against another man. For no more than ten seconds they wrestled for the straw the second inmate was trying to draw away for himself. Most of the bounty was scattered, though each raked the remnant as though he had won.

  Lane recognized now that the near half of the chamber was an archipelago of small territories. Even in such deprived circumstances the inhabitants had staked out their straw kingdoms. He shuddered to imagine what happened when food was doled out in the gray bowls.

  Which begged the question: who maintained this place? Who brought the food, lit the fire, washed the wastes through the scuppers beneath the lancets?

  He passed slowly along the outside the wall to its central darkened recess. The door itself was made of three hewn planks and iron-hinged. There was a Judas hole in the center for looking out. He stuck two fingers in the recess to verify that the cover was in place. Then he stepped back, and his eyes were drawn to the carved letters on the cornice: CINNFHAIL TEACH NA NGEALT.

  The uncial script might be significant to dating this nightmare edifice, he thought, if it had ever existed in reality. And as if to protest his doubts, the gloomy letters suddenly flickered white ahead of low thunder behind him. He peered hard at the words again, memorizing, while the thunder continued to oscillate like an incantation in an arcane tongue.

  The instant he turned it roared and recoiled, and he blinked reflexively at multiple fulminations, dazed at the extent of the illuminated turbulence beyond the mist. The sky was a battlefield arrayed with engines of destruction. Purple welts hung with pennants of smoke massed against rolling thunderheads. As in an apocalyptic painting, he gleaned the impression of much more detail than he actually saw. And this was enhanced by a series of flashes that transformed the painting into a jerky film. But what really riveted him was what was beneath that panorama. Because less than a hundred yards away, framed against a tumultuous sea, was the cliff of Thiollaney Merriu.

  The mist now had transmuted into something wholly aqueous, faintly tinted green and whirling into a storm out over the ocean. Headwinds rushed in, billowing his shirt, fluttering his pant legs, raking his hair. Abban’s warnings seemed to pipe above the highest registers.

  He never looked again at the stone building with the lancet windows. Nearer and nearer he labored toward the edge of the precipice, through ankle-deep grass, past nineteenth century gravestones, past the pond and the pylon, up to and then around the southern edge of the grotto.

  What’s over the edge, Abban?

  I dunno. Could be the faolchÚ hisself.

  He heard waves crashing near at hand and others breaking a long way out. Spume shot into the air ten feet in front of him and he felt the reverberation through his shoes. It was awesomely beautiful, chillingly real. German opera come to life.

  He had to shoulder his way forward against the wind now, and the sea was turning luminous, its green-gray crests deepening to emerald in the troughs. The power of it informed him of his minuteness, and the sheer majesty of air and earth and water meeting with such declamations reinforced Abban’s caution that he would have only “some” control over the consequences of his dreams.

  . . . remember, it’s of your own free will, and I didna trick ya.

  So he had to see over the brink.

  The wind had been a titan’s palm pressed against his gluey progress, but now he was going to depend on it in order to lean out, and if it betrayed him if it abated even for an instant he would plunge down the palisades. He tilted forward and thrust his feet ahead left, right, left, right inches at a time until his center of gravity passed over the lip and he hung above a crashing maelstrom, hung with vertigo and trepidation. Later he would rationalize to the unbearably fine point that what he saw was the obverse nature of dream fear versus dream reality. Because there was a black coach-and-six racing along parallel to the base of the cliff, racing as if the torrent there was a highway, its spinning felloes throwing up four narrow wakes from water that was fathoms deep.

  He had read the myths: the Coach-a-Bower with its spinning white spokes made from thigh bones, driven by the headless Gan Ceann the dullahan and sometimes accompanied by a shrieking banshee both augurs of death. And the dullahan’s whip, capable of surgical precision in removing the eyes of mortals, snapped over the steeds snapped where the heads of steeds would be, if they had any. Nonsense, of course. Nonsense that the Gan Ceann would hit you in the face with a bucket of blood, or that he could lift his severed head up into the air to see you, or that the coach would stop beside you and the door swing open and your name be called (the only sound made by “the silent coach”), irrefusably, irrevocably, irredeemably, to bear you off to eternity. Nonsense of the first order. Except that here it was, tantalizingly real beneath the high arcs of those translucent waves driving up the cliff and curling back.

  “A dream, Abban!” Lane Andersen shouted. Thought he shouted, because the wind stuffed those words back down his throat.

  But his five senses were jangling, and he was shivering, sweating in the wind, bowels awash, lungs choked with air he couldn’t exhale, leaning well into the province of gravity, his feet rooted in the resonance of realms he dared not contemplate. This was a wildness he had never imagined, something from before laws were made and that threatened to rescind reality. The seething panorama of earth, air and water before him was a window, a parallel world accessible through dreams, through mist, through all the unruled ethers of mind and matter.

  Blinking against the spray, Lane craned for a better glimpse of the coach-and-six, wanting to flee at the same time that he wanted to deny. Like a bird transfixed by a serpent, he allowed it nearer and nearer along the highway of the waves, the fine ratiocination of his mind excoriating the image with each veil of froth and spindrift only to have it reappear with new and more electrifying detail. There was the human spine that served as the pole; there was the mildewed cerecloth, worm-eaten and straining to hold the coffin; and the tracks of the thing burning on the water. But no, he would have it be a trick of the waves, sculpting endlessly as they did and drawing upon a limitless palette. And then it was too late, because it w
as spurring toward him, climbing pell-mell up the cliff. Coming to call his name!

  The certainty of it brought him up straight. That is, he tried to straighten. But, as he paddled for balance he broke the knife’s edge equilibrium that was holding him. For all he knew this was the prescribed manner of his death. In any case, the black coach never reached him, never swung its yawning door open. Instead, he pitched off the precipice of Thiollaney Merriu and plunged to the surf below.

  ***

  Salt and cold were the first things he registered after the shock that knocked him senseless. It occurred to him that he was drowning, but it wasn’t all that bad. The womb-like relief from gravity, from the harsh keening of the wind (or was it the banshee) was like dying in the soft muteness of a bed. He wanted to think the right things. Mere seconds of hermetic integrity remained before he gasped reflexively for air and took in ocean, and so it was important to think the right things, but all he could do was go back to the blank wall of his childhood. If it was true that your whole history flashed before you at this moment, then he had this wall blocking him from the beginning, and what he had of the other side were just those words his mother had uttered in retrospect. It was like an important dialogue that life had interrupted. But he had lost the thread of the conversation. He had to remember the questions, had to find the answers.

  Beyond the time compression of a dream, the sea lifted him in a mighty swell that must be aimed at the cliff. He didn’t want to be torn asunder and left dismembered upon the rocks. Again a swell came, thrusting him forward, down, then back slightly. A lesser draw seized him by the ankles like the bony hand through the wall of Cinnfhail and shot him upward on an angle. He didn’t know how, but he was certain that the sea around him had closed, as if there were acoustics and a lessening of pressure. And in this he was right.