PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  His mind’s eye rationalized the topography: a brick ramp rising to an elevation above the chamber behind him in order to keep it from flooding. Like escape valves, the silvery crevices were enough to keep the tidal inundations from reaching the crest of this ramp. He pressed forward, tasting freedom again. But suddenly the ramp turned downward. He had reached the crest.

  Still, it didn’t mean there wasn’t a way out. Because he was under the grotto at the top of the cliff, and there was nowhere to go but out or down, and even going down might lead must lead somewhere important. Humans got here, humans left.

  So now he eagerly crawled the long descending slant that must be stretching beyond the boundary of the cliff. Soon it leveled off, and he felt a chill, somewhat drier than in the chamber. The noxious odor began to mix with a loam smell. I am in the earth, he thought. Not the grotto . . . the earth. And if he needed further confirmation, he had that, too. Because it wasn’t just the ramp that was brick now. It was the walls and the ceiling. He had run out of natural stone; he had left the entombment known as Thiollaney Merriu.

  It wasn’t just the association with bricks that made him think of Cinnfhail at last. It was the swale hole smell that seemed now to have emanated out of that unburned building. He thought this and after a few more feet of torturous crawling, he felt his breath come back at his face, smelled the dead end, heard the terminal acoustics of his own scraping. Reaching out, he touched the bricks that blocked the tunnel.

  Weariness tingled over him like a shroud. It wasn’t fair. The old adolescent nightmare was coming back of the yellow hermetic communal bus (“. . . we all died in a yellow submarine”) filled with urine-soaked infants dizzy and cooking in the heat and a dead baby strapped to a papoose board. He felt sick to death. For a full minute he sucked in long breaths and forced out exhalations, and when he was ready to deal with trauma again, he did the only thing he could do. He reached out to explore.

  Unlike the bricks that formed course after course in the pit at Cinnfhail, the mortar here was intact in the dank atmosphere that fed from the sea chamber. He beat on the wall and the sound seemed to stay in his fist, numbing every bone in his body.

  How close could he be to the asylum? Fifty yards? It hadn’t been that far from the grotto. And then an incredible thought occurred to him. Was this the end of those courses he had begun to uncover at Cinnfhail? Could there possibly be fifty yards of one brick wall after another?

  Whether the bricklayers had been berserk or just terribly, terribly frightened, their state of mind was starting to seem comprehensible to him, because he was having a little trouble fighting off insanity himself right now. Like . . . what if he turned around and there was another brick wall blocking the direction from which he had come?

  He began exhaling forcibly again. Huffing out his breath as he wriggled to do an about face. Let there not be another wall. Please, please! Count ‘em: side walls, floor, ceiling and . . .

  Nothing was in front of him.

  How could there be? There wasn’t any magic here. There never had been. Horror. There had been horror, that was all. And now the horror was dead. It wasn’t going to reappear. He would go back, and it would be just as it was when he started his exploration of the ramp. But his confidence in himself was shaken and bad thoughts were getting to him. He wanted out of this tunnel. Out now!

  So he crawled. Crawled faster than he had ever crawled before. Back to the point at which the ramp rose, then up to the crest above the chamber ceiling, then down to . . . surprise!

  Welcome to the new and improved chamber of horrors.

  Because the water was rising. He could hear it laughing louder with each surge over the smooth round stones. And the light outside the grotto had moved and now splintered through the crevices in such a way that he got a good look at the pit right next to the ramp that he hadn’t been able to see down into before. He couldn’t see all the way to the bottom, of course. Because who knew how deep it was? Just the top that was all he saw. But the top was good. The top was enough for grasping the point. You could infer from the sampling there that the remains were uniform throughout.

  Uniform. They all wore the same uniform. All the skeletons in the pit. Ragged clothes that showed they had died with their boots on. They had not been cannibalized or something crazy like that. And no heart attacks. Probably no heart attacks. (Though who knew how many hearts may have stopped out of ultimate terror before they had been dragged screaming through the tunnel from Cinnfhail.) For sure no cancer, no kidney failure, no consumption, no suffocation. Well . . . in a way suffocation. Because it was hard to breathe with your head twisted off.

  All of them. Heads missing. Spines untidy.

  The heads could be at the bottom of that ossuary pit, you might suppose. That charnel repository. But they weren’t. Because he suddenly realized where they were. They were out there on the apron leading to the rising water. The water that was giggling and laughing as it jiggled the round stones. Which weren’t round stones at all . . . .

  So now he knew where the laughter was coming from. It was coming from all those broken jaws and empty eye sockets spread upon the apron, all those foramen magnums gaping open at the bottom of skulls. Great sweeping laughter with each tidal surge.

  And the joke was on him. (Clang, clang.) Because his air tank was still sitting there on top of the skulls just where he had left it. (Clang, clang.) And each time the swell rose, it lifted the tank, and each time the swell ebbed, it took the apparatus down another inch or two, as if the skulls were passing it along. And each of those inches moved the tank closer to the edge of the long, long drop through endless depths toward the base of a massive pillar that, as far as he knew, was rooted in the next world.

  29

  The crescendo of the tide was underway as he slipped and fell on the algae-mottled skulls. He could hear the intricate dynamics of returning water sputtering distantly, then roaring through adjacent channels in the aqueduct cliff. One end of the tank was already rocking freely, clanging on bone and stone. He tried to right himself and make a last lunge before it lifted, but his feet shot out from under him. Then the swell came and the tank shuddered free in accelerating steps. Ignoring a brutal bruising, Lane Andersen crabbed after it on knees, hips and elbows, snagging an air hose with a last-second dive.

  The mask was gone, but the fins were floating nearby. He snatched them too. Rolling awkwardly, he gathered the pitiful means for delaying his death about him.

  There was no choice now. He knew this, even though he thought about going back to the passage and waiting it out. In a few minutes the chamber would be filled to the roof, and then it would drain, and if he waited that cycle out at the crest of the ramp he would be no better off when the water receded; only a little weaker and facing the coming of night. Daylight might be important if he got back out into the sea. He would never get through the bricks, never be heard through the fissures in the grotto. Sooner or later he had to drop back into the deep with his remaining oxygen to search for a path to the sea . . .

  Better sooner.

  Often in his life, especially his young life, he had not wanted to feel. Now, for the first time that he could remember, he did not want to think. Mechanically he drew the harness back on, fastened the clips and pushed the mouthpiece in. Very little oxygen left, he saw on the gauge. Maskless and pulling the fins over his feet, he rolled out into the rising water and began to swim down.

  He would have to use pressure as a guide. That and contact with the colossal pillar as he descended. When the pressure began to squeeze him it would mean he was moving below sea level. Never mind that the twisting channels might require a deeper descent in order to lead out into the sea. Never mind that the surges could keep him from exiting anyway. Never mind that he wasn’t going to find a way out of the sub-cavern into a channel to begin with.

  The chilly reentry was welcome because the burning salt water worked its way under his eyelids, even though he squeezed them shut, and because elsewhere h
is whole body throbbed with scrapes and bruises. He wanted to be numb. It meant his breathing would slow. Still, he thought he could already sense the constriction that would come with the end of his tank. Let it be quick when it happened. Let him tingle into oblivion.

  He sank without resisting and there were moments when he thought he wasn’t moving at all, and again moments when he thought he was rocketing toward Mag Mell, the Irish land of the dead which some said was at the bottom of the sea. An instinct to survive screamed warnings at him, but he maintained his voluntary torpor. He was halfway to that oblivion he sought when he felt the brush against his leg not on the right leg, which might have contacted the pillar, but on the left. The touch there was more than phantom, more than the current. Reflexively he rolled and opened his eyes in the darkness for one searing moment. This was it. Some primitive feeler had touched his leg the doughy denizen rising to explore a meal. Teeth would be next, wrenching a chunk out of him or clamping down until he died of shock and loss of blood.

  His pulse was pounding and the sigh of the regulator became a boil. But seconds passed and nothing happened. Could it have been a skull plunging over the drop-off of the chamber above? He was almost sure the brief touch on his thigh had swept toward his knee, however, moving up from the depths as he faced downward. And suddenly it became a moot point, because he felt himself yanked into a rapid descent.

  The lifeline, still fastened to his gear, had been trailing freely behind him. The touch on his leg must have been something passing by and snagging it. Or maybe it was the lifeline touching him as it was being pulled downward. Tearing through the blackness, he tried to turn sideways to create drag. But he was like a fish caught on a line by another predator as complex as himself. It was reeling him down to crush depths or to some indefinable lair of like creatures. Even though it probably didn’t live in the cliff. Was there just the smallest possibility he would end up in the sea with a chance to escape? The trouble was that the constriction he had feared suddenly hit his lungs for real.

  He was running out of air.

  His fingers felt like breadsticks as he fumbled senselessly for the knot that held the line. He had a last lucid thought that he had released the rope, that he was spinning free, but gradually it became all hallucination. Hands. Human hands had hold of him. His mother, of course. The nurturing he had never received. Welcoming him now into a hereafter neither of them had been able to foresee.

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

  For once he didn’t rationalize it. On the brink of leaving the Cartesian world, Lane Andersen wanted to believe in the next one . . .

  30

  Brone watched his wife of nearly thirty years descend barefoot through the grotto. She still moved like a young woman after her swims, those daily ablutions to wash away the sediments of the life he had given her. Regally she came, rejuvenated, radiant, her hair swept up into a tiara, her lashes jeweled with droplets, like Esther Williams emerging breathless from one of those old Busby Berkeley American films he had seen in Dublin in his youth. He still saw her like that: airbrushed and unattainable.

  He knew she could see in through the glare of the bedroom window and the gloom beyond, just like she saw through the surface of water, so he stood back as she glided toward the house. But she would know he was there anyway. She always did. Whether because Mr. Billy was lying in the yard or simply by a process of eliminating where he wasn’t, she always sensed his presence.

  It worked in his favor sometimes. He merely had to look at her when her back was turned to let her know his displeasure with her swims, his feeling neglected, his hurts when she failed to stroke his hair or when she overlooked some meager habit of routine that he regarded as communion between them.

  Dropping into the suede chair in the alcove, he could tell by her slackened pace that she had already discovered him. Mr. Billy’s tags jangled in the yard, and then came the slow groan of the front door, followed by unexplained digressions in the kitchen and finally the processional climb up the stairs. She never looked toward the alcove as she entered the bedroom, a sure sign she knew precisely where he was.

  She had a towel and she leaned forward to dry her hair, a patch at a time. The towel was a declaration of her probity: I’ve been swimming, and what’s wrong with that? She had saved him once, if not from the drowning then from the grave afterward, and though she claimed she did not remember going into the pond, she had begun her daily swims then as if he owed her that privilege.

  “Is it for savin’ me or for your comin’ back that you’ve taken this liberty?” he had asked in the arguments to follow.

  “Neither,” she had said. “It’s for you trustin’ me.”

  That was long ago, and his anger at her refusal to mollify his great fear had dulled. Each day that he awoke and saw her virtually unchanged, he was more grateful. He had never stopped staring at her: his radiant fantasy, ash blond and sea-eyed, meticulous as a cat, quiet as a rabbit, patient and longsuffering and dutiful and uncomplaining and always so much in harmony with dawns and dusks and rains and the wind that she seemed inseparable from the very land of his being. Or at least the sea. That she was unhappy he thought he knew even better than she. She seldom laughed, seldom smiled, and though she could sing incredibly sweetly, he had never heard her do so except when she walked the beach or the cliff.

  She undressed, her back to him as she slowly dried each part of her body, a little at a time as she had done her hair. Her skin never tanned but, in natural light tamped by the gloom of the house, had a faint green cast, like rime on a glass of gin.

  He wanted to say something. Could not. The more his passion grew, the harder it was to speak at all. And the rooms of the house seemed to enforce this and to grow emptier somehow with the lapses of thirty years. In all that time they had accumulated little that was not utilitarian or plain or both: a little tatting, some fine linens in a drawer, a tea set on the shelf. There were no family photographs, no gifts from friends, no heirlooms no mementos. And so hollowness and silence pervaded the walls as if they were waiting for a conversation to take hold. They had been waiting for nearly three decades, but all the exchanges were like brief sparks from a flint that failed to light tinder.

  “You’ve been swimmin’ in the sea,” he said lamely this time.

  “I swim every day.”

  “Swimmin’ by the cliff, I meant.”

  “You never know what you’ll find there.”

  “Exactly . . . you never know what you’ll find.”

  She dried her left leg.

  “Have I not loved you, Una?” came out abruptly. “. . . all these years?”

  She toweled her right leg more slowly.

  “And do you not love me?”

  “I do,” she said.

  He rose, crossed behind her. “Then show it.”

  She turned around, and he did what he had done for the duration of their marriage. A ritual of touching and exploring that always left him red-faced and fumbling to undress. He pressed her back on the bed, his burly frame all but eclipsing her. And then between stentorian breaths he said: “Sosi is helpin’ the American.”

  Una looked up at him. “Is that what you want to do to me here on the bed discuss our daughter?”

  He rolled away.

  “I thought it would be different when enough time had passed, Una.”

  “Are you talkin’ about you and me, or you and her?”

  “I dunno.” He sat up.

  “Sosi needs you to help her get away from you,” Una said when he had stood to pull on his trousers.

  “Why? When have I been too hard on her?” He sat back down to put on his socks.

  “It’s not anythin’ you’ve done. It’s who you are what you are. The both of you.” She put her hand on his thigh. “. . . I love you.”

  He nodded but refused to look at her. When he got to the door, she said: “You can’t own another human being.”

  He guessed he kn
ew that already.

  31

  Heaven shouldn’t smell like seaweed, and a raucous gull should not be harassing him, he thought, slowly opening his eyes. What was he doing on the beach just south of Thiollaney Merriu, still wearing fins? The rest of the scuba gear was gone, but according to his mother’s version of eternity, he should be sporting a white robe or something seraphic. Could this really be terra firma pressed warmly against his cheek? Bless the tides and currents, he thought, hearing the waves thud behind him. Lane Andersen was still a living rational human being.

  Note to self: No more cliffs. No more honeycomb, sieve, DisneyWorld, Chutes and Ladders, aqueduct, flume cliffs. Field research sucks some times.

  When he closed his eyes again, images of worn brick and polished skulls mottled with algae returned in nightmare noir, but now, rising stiffly to his feet in Technicolor reality, he put them into context. Wasn’t this exactly what he had been looking for? The pylons and the steles connecting Sacsayhuaman, Giza and Thiollaney Merriu proved that a global taproot existed in antiquity, and there in the ramped chamber was evidence of what had happened after that connection fell apart. He was still going to become the Darwin of theology, as he had thought after Egypt, because . . . because if there had once been a unified global culture centering around religion, or at least around death, then all the divisive faiths to follow represented a devolution. They arose out of the petty regional politics of man, just as warlords arise in the vacuum of a fallen central authority.

  So now he had a crude example of adaptation between a major religion and a pagan one, he believed, that exposed the lack of divinity in each. Because he had no doubt that the dismembered humans in the chamber he had just left had been dragged alive through the bricked passageway that led to Cinnfhail. This was what Obadiah Byrne’s fragmentary letter of July 7, 1833, had hinted at, a collusion between the good Catholic souls of the village and their pagan antecedents: