PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “What are you talking about, old man?”

  “Did I strike a nerve?” Abban feigned attention to the dudeen, then waggled out a match. “So what did you see when you looked down the cliff, lad? Was it the Water Wolf?”

  “I saw everything you see in a dream when you’ve been reading too much blarney.”

  “Did you?”

  “I said so.”

  “Leprechauns and changelings?”

  “Playing draughts with each other.”

  “A pookah?”

  “With Brian Boru on its back.”

  “What else did you see, lad?”

  Lane let go of his anger. “I saw I dreamed I saw the Coach-a-Bower.”

  “Mercy, the coiste bodhar, the deaf coach. But you’re still here.”

  “It was a dream, Abban.”

  “Still, people pass in their sleep. It’s the most common way.”

  “They don’t drown in their sleep.”

  “Oh, so you fell in the sea. And you never heard marchin’?”

  He left the old man and his annoying insinuations, not sure he would return again. He didn’t like being entertainment for the bored retirees of Darrig. He was willing to grant that the rules here were different from anything else he had explored, and that there might be some genuine psychic element in the social memory of this antiquated village that he was picking up, but the tools he was used to the tools he trusted were based on logic. Here in Connemara the myth of an earth-race hidden beneath tree roots and hills was so pervasive that you had to go through it to get to other mysteries. The Dream Pillow was the most blatant example, a pharmacopoeia guaranteed to send him into his own subconscious. That note he had typed to himself If this is here when I wake up, it means I really left the cottage was, of course, still there when he roused out from his long sleep, as were the wet clothes; but that only meant he had wandered out in his drugged sleep. He had found it harder to explain why he didn’t need to shave when he got up around noon, because shaving was what he remembered doing before he went out into the mist, and why would he do that in his sleep?

  ***

  The village actually moved away from Thiollaney Merriu, Doreen Brynn had said, and so Lane was out there at dusk, south of Brone’s property, looking for the old road next to the new.

  Colors deepened at day’s end in lush Connemara, as if light fell like sediment over the landscape. Wild and desolate shadows broke off from the distant crags and flooded the plain of bogs and glacial lakes. The windswept green gained new wrinkles, and the white stones seemed to rise stark as ghosts in the fields.

  Lane waded through the grass on the seaward side of the dirt road leading to McCabe’s churchyard, and he hadn’t crisscrossed many times before he felt cobblestones beneath his feet. It was only a few steps on a grade washed by perpetual rains, but the soft mounds of lichens that had taken hold where the grass could not build were clearly rounded. He traced the section of cobblestones to where the turf had reclaimed the land on flat expanses above and below the slope, and then he arced out again toward the seaward side. Almost immediately he stumbled on a stone foundation.

  It was small by modern standards (the two opposing corners that survived were a dozen feet apart), but it gave him a line to follow north toward Thiollaney Merriu. In short order he found three more sites, each a tiny rectangle of tumbled stone, overgrown and incomplete. The remnants of a chimney drew him, and from there he saw that the land dipped and was lost in billowing saw-toothed reeds. Magpies challenged him from a stand of willows, their blackness animating the blackness of branches. And as he passed beyond that, broken bridge supports rose like saurian necks above a Jurassic fen.

  The first spatters of a lugubrious rain were audible by the time he reached the stream. Concentric ripples linked boulders and mossy timbers barely recognizable as such in their watery graves. He crossed in five or six carefully placed jumps over the flattest stones and was instantly plunged into the gloom of a heavily canopied copse.

  Above him the wind still rushed in the leaves, yet it was hermetically still and dry in the swale hole, and an insufferably sweet smell filled his nostrils. He looked for flowers but saw only greens greens whose deepness bordered on blackness. Whatever grew here did so virtually without light. And he thought he must be looking at vines or ivy mainly, because the rustle of the rain was conducted downward somehow, as if connected things were stirred by it at ground level. For the first time since arriving in Ireland, he felt the palpable charm of its clichÉs. Here was a bower for fantasies.

  Come out, come out, little people! Fiddle and dance! Show me your gold.

  No sooner had he thought this then a shimmer of phosphorescence passed from one end of the hollow to the other.

  He spun around.

  Green, green, green flittered everywhere. Virulent greens, beetle greens, greens that were almost metallic. An inexorable living tide of predator green, poised to strike. And the floral smell had become distinctly rank. A mephitic smell that brought back the black pool in the pillared cavern beneath the Pyramid of Giza.

  Something was emerging and it wasn’t Irish charm. He blinked and peered harder at the thick carpet of shadow all around his feet. What were those blobs that he could see around him now? Puffballs? My, my, gilled and fruity things were everywhere. A fungal paradise. No wonder the smells were so blasphemously exotic.

  So the odor might be explained, but the shimmer of phosphorescence? He hadn’t imagined that. Even though God only knew what kind of hallucinogenic spores he was breathing. Call it ignis fatuus, then. Friar’s lantern. Will-o’-the-wisp. Suddenly he rebelled against the seduction. He wanted the hell out of there.

  He actually began to run. And he told himself it was not because he felt eyes following him, not because his shoes were mashing rubbery things that felt like toadstools but must have been cobblestones. It was because he didn’t want to breathe the cloying air. Air. He needed some. So he fled the hollow, heading north toward the churchyard, and it was funny, but as soon as he got free of the dense canopy, it was no longer raining. Just like that. And damned if it wasn’t magnitudes darker than when he had entered. The moon was even out.

  Ireland was like that, he told himself. A Connemara gloaming was a thing apart from other twilights, other dusks. The darkness came up from all that lush, rain-pampered green as if it had been hiding there since dawn, lurking under clover and fern. And the moon could sneak up on you when you were preoccupied with ruins. So he shouldn’t have been surprised to find that he hadn’t noticed how late it was. What did surprise him delightfully was that directly in front of him were the charred foundations of a fairly large building, and he saw in a moment that he had found Cinnfhail.

  Perhaps it was the scuppers, two of them still visible, that made him shy away from the ruins of the facade, because he strode all the way to the doorsill before stepping over the walls, as if a skeletal hand might shoot out to grab him by the ankle again. There was nothing sinister here now, though. No straw mixed with human wastes, no long plank table, no gray bowls or forged chains. Just the smooth green lie of vibrant turf rooted in blasphemies.

  He found the footings of the basin on the south wall, bone white where the blackened surface had crumbled away. Obviously there had been a fire. He remembered the molten glow he had seen through the mist when he was fleeing the cliff, and he ran his fingers through the air where the wall had been, as he had seen the woman in his dream do. Her prison had not been built of stone after all. It had been built of time.

  Space was such a negotiable commodity. He passed through an emptiness once occupied by a human ordeal he had seen one dawn in a dream: the woman rocking to and fro, the man curled naked on the table, and across the sixty feet, shackles long since rusted into oblivion. And then he turned precisely west. Facing the sea. Facing that dark spot in the floor at the far end, which had seemed an anathema to all the inhabitants of this place. The shadows pooled darkest there, but he could see the thicket of brambles that had
taken over. He took a single step before a voice came to him so intimately, so soft and close, that it might have been his own subconscious.

  “Don’t go there,” it said.

  She was at his elbow: a woman in a cap with a button-down bodice, skirts and stockings. Her face hung gray and pleading, and she was so still that he knew there was something wrong with her. You didn’t sneak up behind people like she must have, and you didn’t stare so unguardedly into a stranger’s face as she did, and you didn’t pause as if you were stuck and needed some cue to animate yourself. He pulled back as tactfully as he could.

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s where they died.”

  “Who?”

  “The seamlas burned down, sir. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t know what a seamlas was. “The building?” he pressed her. “Something inside the building? And that’s how they died?”

  “Ohhh-h, no, sir.” Gluey gray eyes bore into him. “That’s how they were

  freed.”

  “You mean how they escaped?”

  “. . . freed,” she repeated with a tremble, looking at the far darkness where the bramble was.

  There was something else odd about her aspect that he couldn’t quite pin down. “You know all about this place then. What it was. You must have had relatives here, a family history perhaps?”

  “It was a pen, a seamlas.”

  That word again. “Times have changed.”

  “Not changed. Time waits. Time is very good at waitin’.”

  “Well . . . I was just going to take a little look at that midden or whatever it was.”

  He gestured to the west wall.

  Her face strained into his, her unfocused eyes terrible with fear. “Don’t do that, sir.”

  “Why not? There’s nothing here anymore that can threaten us. Look, if anyone died over there, I assure you I’ll be respectful. But you said they escaped. Freed, you said. There was a fire and they got out?”

  “Donnegal set the fire. ‘Twas his idea to feed the clothes through the grill on the sconce, then light the straw and the table. Most the others helped . . . no one was against it.”

  “Clever and courageous. They freed themselves. But how do you know all this? Do you have records?”

  She seemed caught on the moment again, unable to interact further. With a nod he took a few steps away from her, then turned and strode straight to the west wall. It was quite dark now. Out over the ocean the western horizon was a crimson crack whose inadequate light was totally eclipsed by the east side of the foundation. He took out a flashlight and shone it straight into the bramble.

  “Don’t disturb it!” exploded into his ears.

  This time her gray eyes were pinpoints of white glare, her lips rigid, her jaw clenched. She had a shawl wound tightly around her and her whole body flexed with fury, or stress. The odd thing about her aspect bothered him again but remained illusive.

  “Listen, lady, I get your feelings, but I’ve come halfway around the world to look at a few Irish ruins, so with all due respect . . .”

  He turned and with the light pretended to study the stones that underlay the bramble. Pretended because he was tensed for further interference. But she said no more, and in a few moments he became absorbed by discovery.

  The spot had indeed been open at one time. The circularity was a dead-giveaway. It was a well or a midden or possibly a burial pit, if he wanted to let his imagination run away with him. The bramble wasn’t growing out of it, but from either side; so with his foot he lifted the overgrowth and rolled several of the larger stones aside to pin it back. What lay beneath was level and smooth. He scraped at the dirt, and what he uncovered caused him to glance up for the woman’s reaction.

  But she was gone.

  There were bricks under the bramble very old bricks and the fact that they had been mortared was also enticing. Someone had taken great pains to seal the place. He shouldn’t have lost his cool, he thought about the woman. If he had just deferred to her for a while, maybe he could have learned more without offending her. But he was too excited to dwell on where she had gone.

  Obadiah Byrne’s letter of 1833 could not have predated the conversion of a workhouse to an asylum by much, he guessed. And judging by the spawling of the bricks and the powderiness of the mortar, the entombing could be almost that old. It seemed likely that the fire had precipitated the closing of the pit, because he saw no scorch marks on the soft bricks such as were everywhere else. The thing before him had been sealed after Cinnfhail came down.

  Retrieving a knife from his pocket he scraped at the talcum-like mortar, freeing up one of the wide seams. When he had done the same on the opposite side, he dipped his fingers into the cracks and jiggled. The remaining mortar crumbled away. Slowly he raised a single brick.

  He had set the flashlight down in order to work, and the black rectangle between his braced knees yawned with undisclosed possibilities. But the openness seemed flat and immutable somehow. And though the brick he had lifted was damp on the underside, there was no cool exudation of inner earth wafting out of the hole. He fumbled for the flashlight, already knowing that it wasn’t going to expose the secret of this place so easily. When the beam shot into the narrow space another brick stared up at him.

  Beset by impatience, he reached down with his free hand and began tugging adjacent bricks loose from the first row. Mortar cracked and scraped off, collecting on top of another course. He put the light down and worked steadily until he had all but a few of the first layer taken up. Then he stopped, stared, thought. What could be so valuable or toxic or terrible or secret or deadly that someone would use a double layer? Somewhat less enthusiastically, he raked at the mortar of the second row.

  Time waits. Time is very good at waitin’.

  As before, the seams were dry and loose. And the opened space was wide enough to admit some illumination from the flashlight, which he had stuck into the bramble. He cleared several bricks before lifting one. Then, coming cautiously from a kneel to a squat, he drew the middle brick upward.

  But again there was nothing. No wisp of cankerous rot, no miasma, no skeletal hand shooting out to claim his throat . . . nothing.

  Standing, he plucked the flashlight out of the bramble and directed the beam straight down into the hole. And he thought: any grisly find would be less ominous than what he was looking at. Because he was staring at the earthen tone of a third layer of bricks.

  Dropping immediately to his knees he raked up the remainder of the second row and drove his knife down into the seams of the third. Here and there the blade seemed to bottom out against hard surfaces (and why wasn’t at least some of the mortar falling into empty space). Up came the third row, revealing a fourth.

  He took a loose brick and pounded it on the fourth row. The sound was dull, flat. Excavating further now, he uncovered a fifth row. And a sixth. A seventh. At the eighth row, with the soundings just the same, and having reached as far as he could easily reach, he stood and wiped his hands on his pants.

  They must have been terrified whoever did this. They must have been virtually berserk. Because it was ridiculous. Nothing needed this kind of walling in. It was a testament to something obsessive, that was all. A proof of man’s superstitious ignorance and bottomless fears. “Superstition!” he yelled aloud. And it sounded unconvincing even to him.

  Whatever was down there would still be there, if he decided to waste more time on it, he told himself. It had waited for nearly two centuries, so it would be there another day. But he took the time to reset the bricks loosely in the pit. Row by row. Not out of fear, of course, but because he didn’t want some other seeker to preempt his own potential discovery. Then he rose and headed east by moonlight.

  Somewhere along the road to Darrig it hit him about the woman he had spoken to. The thing that was wrong with her, the odd aspect of her being that he couldn’t quite pin down. She hadn’t breathed. With all the passion she had poured into his face, i
t was as if she had been on the other side of a glass barrier. She had not breathed.

  25

  Spy on the Yank? Dear God, my father thinks I’m Mata Hari!

  Sosanna was outraged that he seemed willing to have her trade her attentions for information. Was he that desperate to protect his secrets? She seemed vaguely to be trapped by circumstance between two men in the most ridiculous way. One of them demanded faith but withheld secrets, the other demanded answers but withheld faith. How great was her need for those answers, she wondered. She was in danger of favoring one just by reacting to the other. But she would not be a little lass imprisoned by a paranoid father. She had taken the trouble to sketch the Pillar, and she would consult with the American very business-like.

  Only, she didn’t want to go to his self-catered cottage again. He drove a steel-blue car, she thought, one of those low-skirted ones that looked like it was sliding along the road. And he was just pig-headed enough to continue frequenting Glenna’s Kitchen, where she had heard Flann Macloy had knocked him down, and so she contrived to be in the shops between his self-catered cottage and the restaurant that morning. When she saw him speed past at about nine-thirty she gave it another minute and wandered up the street toward Glenna’s.

  He was sitting at a table alongside the wall and saw her as soon as she entered. She looked past him, intent on a pretended vacancy among the crowded tables at the back. When he leaned out slightly, she started up the aisle, timing it so that an elderly couple on their way to the cash register blocked her just as she was opposite his table.

  “Beggin’ your pardon!” she said sprightly and, turning to yield them the way, found herself facing Lane Andersen half-risen and gesturing to the empty seat at his table.

  “Oh. Mr. Andersen.”

  “It’s Lane. Good morning. I don’t suppose you’d care to help me with this menu?”