PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “It’s fair warnin’ I’m givin’ ya, lad,” the old man had solemnly instructed him more than once. “Dinna trust the bird that refused to go into the Ark but flew outside chatterin’ maliciously while the world drowned.”

  And hadn’t his father died after his hair was barbered out in the yard and, before anyone could stop it, a magpie collected a cutting and took it to build its nest? He had died within the year, just as the legend foretold. So here they were magpies one of the banes of life, come to call a greater bane.

  Brone actually trembled as he approached them in the trees. And when he saw the first pair, poised like arrows pointed at him, he murmured an old childhood prescription:

  “‘Clean birds by sevens, unclean by twos,

  The dove in the heavens ’s the bird I choose.’”

  But the rest of the tiding of magpies was no longer fixated on the grotto, they were shrieking at the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu, if one could judge by the movement in the trees. What consensus derived from such chaos? Each flow from branch to branch produced fresh censure, as if sheer peer outrage were melding a weapon. For a moment Brone wished he could be part of their primal madness, surrounded by a will and a force that would survive any individual’s destruction. But he had no reinforcements. He was alone, and he must choose his allies cautiously.

  With extreme terror fluttering in his breast, he moved disjointedly toward the water’s edge, his shoulders jerking up and down as if one leg were shorter than the other. At the brink he beheld faint flickers deep within the pond and, emitting a faint gasp, he fell to his knees.

  It was there. Surely he was seeing the feral yellow eyes and the suggestion of greenish fangs and the dark bulk swaying below them. What accident had put the McCabes on this spit of land between Heaven and Hell? What could he bring to bear at such a crossing?

  Dinna trust . . .

  “Give me more time,” he pleaded. “Haven’t I kept mortals from the churchyard?

  . . . I’m still the last one buried the one true Watcher . . . I’ll catch whoever has been diggin’ . . . and I’ll let nothin’ cross the boundary as long as I’m this side of it! Only leave my family alone . . . leave all the family of Man alone” behind him the magpies shrilled “we’re both Watchers, you know” shrilled into ecstasy “you and me . . . me of the graves, you of the Gate.”

  27

  Lane got the scuba gear from an enterprising tour guide just south of Killary Bay. It was a short but electrifying drive, during which he nearly slaughtered an aging ewe that limped into his path from behind a towering hedge. The prompt appearance of a bellicose farmer gave rise to suspicions that the ewe would not survive many more passing cars before compensation was demanded and received. The tour guide was equally avaricious and had a long story about how much it had cost him to acquire the scuba gear from a tidal island called Illaunmore.

  But at length, sans wetsuit and not wholly certain he remembered the generalities of using a regulator and gauge, Lane was sizing up the swell that seesawed along the cliff of Thiollaney Merriu. It wasn’t all that risky, he told himself. He wasn’t going deep, and he wasn’t going into the cliff. He merely had to disprove what he had seen in a dream: that there was an opening beneath the waterline. The two hundred feet of stretch cord he had with him was insurance, though now he looked in vain for a place to anchor it.

  He climbed the flanking boulders that began on the south edge of the cliff and this took him less than a third of the way across. There were numerous smaller stones on the level where he stood, roughly twenty feet above the surging waterline, but none of them inspired confidence. If he looped the cord around one, the tension might cause it to work its way through under the base. Nothing else presented itself, however, and selecting two of the upper stones, he ran the cord around them both, secured it with a bowline, and tied off the other end on his harness.

  The weight of the tank and the fins called for a cautious, if comical, rappel. But if he felt like a dope on a rope with his flapping and slithering descent, riding the swell up and down at the waterline was perilously close to a crisis. Barely would he get the fins planted on the boulder, then another rolling wave would leave him twisting on the line, tank clanging.

  It wasn’t until he got the mask on and the regulator between his teeth that he found respite deeper down. But even in that denser cushion of water, it was hard to keep a position. He had imagined a force coming straight in that he could brace against using the line and his feet on the cliff. The trouble was that the force didn’t come straight in. It rolled with the swells, lifting and dropping him. He wasted exhausting minutes and precious air just learning to negotiate the rhythm of the sea, and by that time the gauge, which he could barely read, was already moving toward the red.

  But it wasn’t going to take long to explore the underwater face of the cliff, he thought. He could almost have done it with a snorkel. So he finned along in slow increments, pausing to position against each swell, his fingers raking silky slime with each backward thrust. The ghostly green seemed magnified beneath the waves. And then he had an inspiration. He would drive himself the full length of the stretch cord tether and let the prevailing angle of surge carry him back along the stone scarp.

  He wished he had anchored from the north end so as to use the line for control, but that might have put him in view of the McCabe house. At any rate, he didn’t have enough oxygen to start over again now. So he poured it on, kicking steadily, taking full pulls when he didn’t have to brace against the cliff. He was at perhaps two fathoms and making progress when he felt the change. Something seemed to be assisting him. Organic fingers stroked his neck and undulated past. Sea growth trailed in his face. Too late he tried to resist. The current was funneling into the cliff.

  It was like a black hole from that point on, and he was extraneous matter being drawn into an irresistible void. He yanked on his line, taking up the yield, which quickly reversed the direction he was facing. But that was fine, because he was kicking for all he was worth and pulling hand over hand on the line, trying to reclaim open water. His forearms and biceps ached, threatening to cramp as he drew even with the face of the cliff. Then, just as he thought he was going to make it, he shot back a yard or two, his tank knelling dolefully off the edge of the hole in the ancient stone palisade.

  It was all he could do not to let go of the stretch cord in the furious current, and he hung there too weak to pull anymore. His own carelessness had played into it. He had compromised the safety line by wrapping it around two small boulders; and that was what had caused the slippage. The loop had squeezed its way under one of the boulders.

  And he was helpless to stop the same thing from happening with the second anchor stone. He could actually feel the thrum as the stretch cord loop compressed and snapped through the gaps between its base and the ledge upon which it sat. Inch by inch he felt it give, as if the contorting line were one of the vermicular things from the birth chamber in the cliff. A curious synesthesia invested the pulses, conveying images as well as words and thoughts: his mother, young and vibrant again, her long brown hair falling over him as she kissed the top of his head.

  . . . they weren’t lost, they were looking, he heard her say once more about the lost people she had abandoned him to in California. There’s a difference.”

  What was the difference? She had never answered that. But she herself had kept looking, hadn’t she? At least until AIDS had stopped her. The Search. The

  all-important state of not being lost yet. She had done it to create continuity. She had done it to give him the stele. That was his connection with a pater absentia.

  . . . You want to believe in something magical in the worst way. It’s all tied up with your innocence, isn’t it? Something you think was stolen from you when you were growing up. So you tried to ban magic from your life. But all you really did was the change the name to science or logic or something.

  She hadn’t given a rat’s ass for his intent or his conclusions. It
was the search. And here he was, on the end of a tether. Her tether, his lifeline.

  . . . thank you for not letting me die alone, son. I wish I could do the same for you.

  That was his moment of death epiphany. His all-in-a-moment flashback with revelations. Because suddenly the cord went slack.

  28

  He had done it in the dream. Been swept into a narrow fissure, a flume, and spat out again live. But this was unambiguous reality, the sole aspect of being he trusted. So now he was pummeled and twisted through darkness, his skin shredding under stinging rasps, his bones tingling with sharp raps. The tank rang off rock like the Bells of St. Mary’s but saved him from that much bodily contact and diminished the space in which he caromed. Likewise the mask and fins provided a feeble buffer. But his hands and forearms were raked as he tried to protect his head and the surrounding flexible hoses that carried his oxygen.

  Where was the back surge from the swell that fired through the reduction valve of the cliff’s architecture? It wasn’t happening. The dream had betrayed him. But even in the chaos of his ride he knew the reason why the water didn’t answer gravity, didn’t behave as it had in the dream. That had been an ascent. This was a descent. He was going down, and there wasn’t going to be any oxygen pocket or sudden ebb to draw him back to the open sea.

  If he survived the battering, he would last until the tank was empty. Then he would drown. And even as he thought this, he felt the current relax. He was still spinning but no longer coming in contact with anything. Reaching out, finning slowly in the absolute blackness, he soon came to an unnerving awareness. He was in an underwater cavern.

  When he was sure which way was up, he began to reach above himself, fearing what he would find, fearing what he would not find. And it came quickly enough, a slope leveling out into a ceiling, stinging his fingers with the abrasion. Both his hands were flat against it now. He hung absurdly in the silence and once again the sound of his respirator became profoundly intimate, subdued bubbles bleeding into the void. He wanted those bubbles back, wanted to absorb any last oxygen they might contain. Was he hallucinating already? Oxygen deprivation could do that, but so could claustrophobia, so could extreme terror. And he thought he felt all three.

  He remembered a bunch of jocks at school locking him in a steam room when he was an undergrad. They had removed the shut-off valve and blocked the opening under the door with wet towels, and he had felt the suffocation and the claustrophobia and the terror then. That was what came back to him now. Chill had replaced the steam, but the fluttering in his brain and the constriction in his chest were the same.

  He fought it, if only because he didn’t want to die in a panic. The indignity of fear would make him like all those superstitious people he had looked down upon. Why should he give in now? He would die calm. This was no less than a womb, replete with fluid and oxygen piped in. He had come in one, so he could go out in one. He would float for a while longer, then just let go. Glut himself and lose consciousness. No panic. No tearing the apparatus away as he had read some divers did.

  He stopped the slow kicking that kept him at the roof of the cavern and began to sink, but almost immediately the apprehension that he wanted to suppress began to mount again. Because he had always hated depths as he hated heights. Depths contained beasts of prey, depths waited jaws open to rend your flesh and gnash your bones.

  How far had he dropped?

  The pressure was beginning its squeeze. He pictured doughy denizens around him, sightless bottom-feeders already picking up his vibrations, knowing his exact size and where he was, preparing the lunge, the coup de grce, the graceless gulp that would leave him screaming silently in the digestive juices of some behemoth.

  No. He couldn’t die that way. Not without a struggle. Call it panic, then. Call it what it was. Kicking furiously, he turned horizontal, arms stretched out like a blind man’s, rocking forward with long, slow undulations of the fins until he reached the wall.

  He felt for a handhold, something to anchor to, but the slime repulsed him. Far below he thought he saw a wisp of biophosphorescence. Three green smudges clustered together. Already he was dropping toward them, so he kicked again until he was bumping along the wall, his fingers tracking through ooze, encountering disturbing ridges here and there that seemed too regular, too much like intelligent designs. And the mucosal surface was curving away horizontally, obliging him to angle after it. It gave him a dÉjÀ vu feeling.

  Hadn’t he encountered just such convex arcing in the sub-cavern below Giza? He remembered the shock he had felt then when he realized he had been traveling around an immense pillar, as if that hellish realm were the underpinnings of the earth. And here it was again. A pillar. The further he swam, the more he was sure. A gigantic pillar. It left him more awed than alarmed this time, more stunned. He didn’t want to consider what it meant in the scheme of things . . . these underrealms braced with titanic supports.

  The crude colossi were some dynamic process of erosion, that was all, a honeycomb wearing away that had achieved startling symmetry. And those three dollops of green glow he had seen below him on the wall could not possibly be like the viridescent quartz inlays of the jackal head in the sub-cavern below Giza. These were tricks of association in a mind that was losing its grip.

  Somewhere in his pointless circling he heard a leviathan groan begin. It had the languor of awakening the bleating of some primal appetite? He listened as it repeated, and after a minute or so began to suspect that it was too rhythmical for an animal on the hunt. Just another voice in the wildness beyond human order. Outside the cliff an

  ever-changing ocean was sending its pulses. Inside the cliff a maze of inscrutable passageways was channeling that sea blood through a vascular mystery in the earth, as if Thiollaney Merriu itself were alive. There were too many variables for him to figure it out: tides, currents, capillary action, gravity and pressure changes created by reduction valves of stone. Not that it mattered when you were doomed. When you were doomed and change was the only hope.

  For the first time since he had been swept up he began to really think about the current. It hadn’t reversed the way it had in his dream. So where was it going? If it wasn’t backing up, maybe it was breaking over a barrier, filling some inner tidal pool. There had to be an exit point.

  With both hands pawing at the viscid pillar he began to rise. Faster and faster he sped, ignoring the possibility of decompression sickness. Never mind that he had been at an unknown depth for an unknown time. Up, up he glided until the leviathan groan became mellifluous chatter and the darkness became light.

  Relative light.

  He broke the surface into a low-roofed chamber that was filled with gloom. The light that filtered in came through mossy crevices between the same kind of monoliths that were strewn throughout the grotto. This was the end point he had sought. He was still imprisoned, but he was near the top of the cliff!

  He spat out his mouthpiece and inhaled cavernously. The ambient air was dank and humid, and there was a lingering whiff of something virulent that always abhorrent taint he had picked up beneath Giza and again in the insufferable swale hole he had visited within sight of the ruins of Cinnfhail. But freedom was at hand! Spontaneously he shouted at the paper-thin splinters of light between the monoliths. The reverberation was almost painful. The grim truth was even more painful. Sound was not as agile as light. The crevices were too thin, the stones too thick. No one was going to hear him.

  An apron of algae-mottled stones made a crescent around half the chamber he was in. The laughing sound of water washing over loose round stones was the chatter he had heard when he broke the surface. He crawled out and crouched there, divesting himself of mask, fins, hoses and tank, the latter clanging tightly in the chamber. Then he made his way over the slippery footing to the nearest of the silvery crevices. He put his lips close and hollered again, but the sound generated was so flat that he knew it was futile. When he pulled back, he spat moss.

  Claustroph
obia returned. Obviously the moss, which ran all across the low wet roof and dripped steadily, was regularly underwater. His little sanctuary would be

  short-lived. Water gurgled at his feet, disturbingly like someone choking.

  He studied the silvery crevices. There must be many more that angled through the rock in such a way as to exclude light. But not water. Water would sieve out of this chamber. Where did it go? Ah. The pond. When the chamber was suddenly flooded, the water was forced through the crevices at high rates. This was the drain field, or one of them, that kept the pond at a constant level.

  Methodically he surveyed the gloom, noting at last the darkness at the upper end of the apron of stones. He had taken it to be silhouettes and shadows contrived by boulders and the dim light, but now he saw that there was space beyond. Daring to hope, he negotiated the slippery round stones in simian fashion to the high end of his prison.

  In a moment he could see a pit and a ramp ascending into the hole, and the hole ascending into blackness. He was faintly shocked when he reached out and instead of encountering a patch of algae or the crescent of another stone that had been polished by ages of tumbling against its neighbor, he found something less alien. Face raised blindly, fingers dancing along the rectangularity, he felt mixed emotions. No question: the ramp was paved with bricks.

  It meant that humans had been here. There was access to the upper world. The ramp, the hole, were man-made.

  Stumbling faster, ankles twisting, taking a bruise to a knee, he avoided the darkened pit and gained the ramp. Up he scrambled into the hole, swept by darkness and a sudden intensifying of the mephitic smell, and that stopped him. Did he dare go further? He paused to reach out as far as he could, gauged the smell, listened to the repercussion of his own breathing off the walls for a few calculating moments. Then he crawled forward.