PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  An eddy spun her around, and there was Lane Andersen grasping the Pillar with one hand, outspread fingers reaching for her with the other. But the currents bullied her onto her back and something beneath her in the black water began to rise, taking on hard edges as it cradled her.

  She tried to sit up, couldn’t. She was in one of the black boxes, an open coffin, and as it began to whirl, it drove her against one edge. Her fingers slid along the lower seam, catching on something her heightened senses recognized. It was a metal butterfly. At least that was what she had thought as a little girl when her father showed her a coffin that had sat in the shed for a century or more and explained that the “butterflies” were hinges on a slip coffin. This is how they buried the poor and the unclaimed, lass. Reusable coffin. Swing you over the grave, then they drop the bottom and down you go into the eternal night.

  Enough. She wanted out of this dream. Wanted for the bottom of the box she was in to stay put, thank you. Do not let it open!

  The slip coffin was still moving, not spinning but circling something, and she could tell by the thrumming against her ear that it wasn’t only water beneath her. She heard something regimented. Something like marching. Right through the wood. And the smell fouler than a leprechaun’s dudeen pipe! Please . . . please, do not open. Above her, as a warning vibration from the side opposite the hinges reached her, revolved the three-sided apex of the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu, and then she heard a faint snick . . .

  Her hips fell first, leaving her arms reaching up reflexively, and that was how the hand caught her wrist, and how she awakened, her fingers entwined with Lane Andersen’s there on the Dream Pillow in his self-catered rental cottage just outside Darrig.

  ***

  She pulled him up with her right out of a sound sleep, the two of them whoozy, disheveled, like riders just off a roller coaster.

  “Well?” she managed, breathless, her brow as white and damp as that of an alabaster caryatid in the churchyard.

  “Well what?”

  “Did we . . . did you dream the same dream?”

  He took a cavernous breath, letting his head drop back as he exhaled. “I didn’t have a dream.”

  “Oh.” She let go his hand. “Nothin’ atall?”

  “You shouldn’t put stock in dreams.”

  “I s’pose not.”

  “Especially ones that come out of a pillow full of herbs.”

  “Right.”

  “Especially in Darrig where the population hallucinates half the time anyhow.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion.” She stood up, smoothed out her clothes. “It might have meant somethin’, though . . . even if it was a bad dream . . . I mean us sharin’ it and all . . . as long as it came out right.”

  “Reality is right. You’re here, I’m here. That’s reality.”

  “Don’t you want to know what I dreamed?” The introspection left her eyes, replaced by a piercing scrutiny.

  “Of course,” he said.

  So she told him of the dance, the shape-shifting between her father, Flann Macloy and Mabbina Conneely, the inundation and the rising of the dead, the Pillar and the slip coffin, and his rescue of her.

  “That’s hysterical,” he said. “You see how silly these things are. What did you mean, ‘it might’ve meant something’? I hope you’re not going to turn it into one of your superstitious Irish omens.”

  “You rescued me,” she repeated a little shyly, disappointment mounting.

  “Just barely . . . you said.”

  And then a glint of craft came into her eyes, and the almond brightened to raw sienna. “You’re not tryin’ to protect me, by any chance, are you? Because you can’t change the future just by disbelievin’ it.”

  He laughed unconvincingly. “No,” he said and shook his head.

  ***

  He watched her all the way up the road.

  She was on the money. Every element of the dream, detail for detail. Except that when the dancer in his arms began to change, he hadn’t seen her father or Flann Macloy or this Mabbina Conneely. The dance partner in his arms had changed only once. And she had whispered a warning to him: “Hang onto her . . . hang onto her till death do you part!” Once was terrifying enough. Because the frail flesh that sagged in the dark and the emaciated face that followed in the light were his mother.

  40

  They came at high noon a day after the McReedys had fled with their corpse and their curse. They said they were there out of concern for the keeping of the dead. But Brone had been expecting the curious to come looking for evidence of a burned grave. There was “Doc” Trevor Dunn, Sweeney the embalmer, retired headmaster Noel Kelly, and Brendan Doyle, who had trotted over from Galway to give the encroachment the appearance of a county sanction. In the bright sunlight they looked like a quartet of blanched vampires trying to return to their coffins post dawn, but they called themselves a committee and pretended they didn’t know about the fire.

  “It’s come to our attention that you’re makin’ access to graves difficult again, Mr. McCabe,” Brendan Doyle said. His sugar beet nose blazed in the sun, and a twitch in the left eye kept him winking. “Is there a danger here the public ought to be made aware of?”

  “The danger is I’ll lose my temper,” Brone said, doughy hands clamped firmly to either gate. He had seen them drive up.

  “Not the first time,” sallow Sweeney imparted with the quiver of a sneer.

  “Be reasonable, McCabe,” Doc Dun said. “Declarin’ the churchyard closed to further burials has created more than one crisis over the years, and you’ve had your way over it, but you can’t expect the livin’ to be cut off as well.”

  “Who have I cut off?” Brone blustered as if this news was indeed cause for dismay.

  Noel Kelly took a step to the side of the gates and raised an arm toward the graves, pointing the damning finger that had terrorized schoolboys for forty years. “I s’pose you didn’t drag Moriarty out of the hallowed earth which might’ve saved him when he was struck by lightning? And him at your funeral never guessin’ you’d be the instrument of his demise.”

  “You’re pointin’ the wrong way, it was over there that his misguided wife and daughter tried to bury him. I helped him back from a premature grave, though I don’t remember him helpin’ me out of mine.”

  “—then there’s the McReedys.”

  “Grave robbers. I didn’t stop them either.”

  They were all craning now. “Looks kind of scorched over there,” Sweeney said, weaving to see through the bars. “Have you been burning something, McCabe?”

  “Amazin’ how you can see a hole that isn’t there. I filled it back up yesterday.”

  “Well, are you gonna let us in to see for ourselves?”

  “What for?”

  There was a brief hesitation. It was the wrong request to make. They hadn’t anticipated being blocked at the gates, had seen themselves trooping through Thiollaney Merriu confronting Brone at some arbitrary point.

  “D’you have any business here?” Brone followed up almost cheerfully. “I don’t seem to recall you do. Not a deceased relative here between you. The leases provide for family access, as you well know, and all else is at my discretion.”

  Sweeney was nonplussed: “Listen, McCabe, there’s hardly a body in there from the last half a century that I didn’t prepare for burial.”

  “You’re standin’ on ceremony, man,” added Kelly.

  “And you’re standin’ on the road,” said Brone.

  Brendan Doyle’s left eye winked furiously. “You’re paid by the county, I’ll remind you. Paid for the land, paid for caretakin’. And you’ve got no taxes.”

  “Well, that’s true. So you’re thinkin’ I should go out of business, eh?” Brone inclined his head. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been turnin’ that thought over myself. My father used to say we had farmers in the family, though I can’t imagine where they lived, since there’s always been a cemetery here, called a ‘churchyard
’ by most which prob’ly refers to religious orders best forgotten. I’d have to turn out my tenants. Refurbish the land, so to speak. Still, it could be done.”

  “Can’t be done!” Sweeney expostulated automatically.

  “Course it can. Have to serve notice, I s’pose. Provide time for removals, then the rest well, you can’t argue with fertilizer.”

  They all looked shocked at that. Doyle actually made a fist and shouted. “You’re out of your mind! We’ll be back. There’s plenty the county has a right to monitor in a churchyard!”

  “I’ll be glad to cooperate with a court order, gentlemen. But I owe it to the dead not to see them disturbed with sight-seein’.”

  And that was it. The mocked quartet departed in their vehicles with a great slamming of doors, while Brone locked his hands behind his back at the gate and whistled soundlessly to himself. And it was that silent whistling that they all would claim to have heard when they gave their recitations of the outrage to sympathetic listeners at Buskers and in Galway.

  If only Brone McCabe could have whistled. But his throat was dry, his heart seized, his truncheon legs filled with lead. It was all he could do to act the part he had just played, because the inquisitors had come at the worst possible moment. He couldn’t let them in. And now, as the last car rounded the curve and the dust drifted toward the iron fence, he hurried back through the rows of markers to that one grave, the one he had filled, Merna McReedy’s abandoned eternity. Because the smell of retting flax was back rot with something burnt in it and there was smoke rising from the grave.

  How could it be smoking?

  The petrol had burned down quickly yesterday. He had seen that it was out; and anyway, he had filled the hole. He hadn’t replaced the sod, but he had filled the hole to the grass line. It was impossible that something was burning down there. No coffin, no remnants, just dirt. And yet here it was. It couldn’t be a trick of mist in the bright sunlight, foul white wisps were unmistakably seeping up through the porous soil as if from a griddle on a hot stove. Trembling, he knelt and sank his hand into the warm earth.

  So he fetched Una and a Bible as if both were weapons, and when they had hurried back to the smoldering plot he peered with trepidation at the ground for any hint that the cause of the heat was advancing. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Do you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “You know what. The marchin’ dead, the dirge of Hell the bardoon, woman! You’re the one who said it had started that day we dragged the coffin out of the sea. And you know you can see through the water and hear through the land better than any . . . better than I can. Feel the grave.”

  She genuflected, spread her hand on the warm soil, came up slowly. “I don’t hear it.”

  “It must be loud enough to hear for this to happen. I heard it myself the day I became the Watcher. They never stop testin’ and probin’. Put your ear to the ground.”

  “I don’t hear it!” she flashed at him. “What good will it do to hear it? There’s nothin’ to be done when it comes.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” he croaked, wildness growing in his eyes. “This is circumstantial, Una . . . it doesn’t have to be. We’ve disturbed things, that’s all.”

  She looked at him with a mixture of pity and contempt for the desperate denial in his words. “Its time is written,” she said.

  “Written?” he exploded and began riffling through the pages of the Bible he clutched by the spine. “You know what it says, Una . . . we’ve read it a hundred times . . . Revelation, chapter nine . . . does that sound like me? It can’t possibly be me! . . . this is all an aberration, a a circumstance . . . we’ve got to hold fast . . . these things don’t come about because a few human insects poke around in the dirt . . . this will calm again, you’ll see.”

  Later he sat rocking gently at the kitchen table, the Bible open before him to Revelation, chapter nine, murmuring: “I am not the fallen one from heaven given the key to the bottomless pit . . . I am not Abaddon . . . I am not Apollyon . . . I am not the one who will release two hundred million demons to kill a third of mankind . . .”

  41

  He had never been in love before, never considered it a thing apart from lust. As far as Lane Andersen had been concerned Freud nailed it when he called love the overestimation of the sex object. But now here was Sosanna McCabe.

  He was beginning to see that his mother had been right in saying that the things he attacked faith, fantasy, innocence were really the things he wanted. And Sosanna McCabe was all three. He wished he could be that simple, that paradise had never been lost, that Man had never eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, that the myths that ruled the world were not lies with power over the one thing he had: logic. He wished he could live in her unfettered universe of inexpungable magic, if only for an hour. Why had he pretended they hadn’t shared the dream? Was it more than a fear of premonition?

  The fact that she now needed some rational explanations for the mysteries of her life put her in his camp for the moment, as if she aspired in some expedient way to be like him. But how long could that last? She had a harmony he would never have. She accepted the wonders around her, and therefore they remained wonders. He could destroy her with his cynicism, he thought.

  “So which of us is going to win?” he asked when she met him in a sylvan place halfway between Darrig and Thiollaney Merriu the day after they had shared the Dream Pillow.

  He earned her coolest glance. “We had a dog like that once,” she said. “Everything was a challenge to him. If you tried to pet him, he ran around in circles.”

  “Ouch. You were supposed to ask ‘win what.’”

  “I’ve fenced with men before. They love their double meanings. It’s the same answer, whatever you were referrin’ to.”

  “I was referring to the classic conflict of faith and reason the virgin and the dynamo. You’re the virgin.”

  “Thanks a heap. But we’re goin’ nowhere fast bein’ enemies.”

  “Love thine enemy.”

  She extracted a sprig of flowers from the spiny gorse growing next to them. “Why is it you think there’s no room for faith alongside reason?”

  “Faith is a wish driven by emotion.”

  “So it’s emotions you’re afraid of. Not surprisin’. You bein’ just a man.”

  “You can’t nail down truth with emotion.”

  “Can’t you, now? Seems to me you can’t appreciate truth without emotion. That would be like watchin’ a Technicolor film in black-and-white.”

  “Not surprisin’ you want to color everythin’,” he said, trying to imitate her Irish brogue. “You bein’ just a woman.”

  “But I’m not afraid of truth, however it comes. Are you?”

  “Of course not. It’s my . . .”

  “Passion?” She smiled faintly. “I guess reason doesn’t exist in an emotionless vacuum after all.”

  “I wasn’t going to say ‘passion.’ Logic should be served cold.”

  She plucked off a knot of spines from the gorse. “Here’s faith.” She gave him the flowers. “And here’s reason.” She gave him the thorns. “It takes both to make the plant, doesn’t it?”

  He sneezed and flicked away the bouquet. “Why don’t we join forces? That way whichever one of us is right, we’ll both find out the truth.”

  “Join forces?”

  “To figure out Thiollaney Merriu. You’ve got a boat there on the pond. Your father actually rowed me across the tide in it one evening. If I borrow it, he’ll probably have me arrested, but you could take it and row me out to examine the pylon. I know it’s asking a lot . . .”

  “To put it mildly, my father would disown me.”

  “Okay. I can try it on my own without the boat. I’ll just sneak in and swim across.”

  “I wouldn’t advise that.”

  “It’s all right, I can try it at night with a flashlight.”

  “Don’t go in the pond by yourself,” she said.
“Especially at night.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just . . . don’t.”

  “Monsters at night, your father by day: six of one, half a dozen of another.”

  She chewed her cheek. “All right. My father will be runnin’ up the coast to Muldeen for groceries and a pint of plain later on, when he figures Darrig won’t notice his absence, and my mother . . . my mother seems distracted. I don’t know what she’ll do if she sees us, but we can try.”

  ***

  He skirted the surf and she carried her shoes, kicking through the shallows as they walked up the beach south of the cliff. He had never seen her so jaunty and offhand. Water boiled faster when the tide was flowing in, she said, and the feathers of sea birds made pillows fluffier. And did he know there were more births on an incoming tide and more deaths on the ebb? Parish registers along the coast, which always noted the tide, proved it. Bad record-keeping, he said. And then they entered Thiollaney Merriu where he promptly sneezed again and she warned him that to do so among the tombstones would be very bad luck.

  “I think I’m allergic to that bouquet you gave me,” he said.

  “Allergic to truth,” she diagnosed.

  When they passed close to the grave of Merna McReedy, she paused.

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t know. Father’s losin’ his green thumb.”

  The grass, a deep green less than a day before, was cooked yellow.

  They passed on and came to the upturned rowboat, whose deep gouges the length of the hull had already begun to weather a uniform gray. Once afloat, Lane steadied the craft from the edge while she stepped in. She fitted the oars and shipped them, then took his backpack as he made the seesaw step aboard. They sculled in a half-circle toward the pylon.

  “How deep?” he asked to the clunk and squeal of the oars.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Doesn’t anyone fish here?”

  “No fish.”

  “Or swim?”

  “It’s a churchyard, not a water park.”

  The water played silver and gold where the oars dipped but remained uniformly black elsewhere with no hint of a bottom or boulders or weeds. She brought the boat around broadside to the Pillar. He unzipped the backpack, pulled out a camera and adjusted the focus. “Back in a flash,” he punned, grasping the three-sided pylon with one hand and drawing himself out of the boat.