The dry adhesion of the stone brought back the pylon in the sub-cavern at Giza. Sosanna’s sketch had done it justice, but he could see that there were indeed micro-fine renderings. Except that, unlike the others, they were not on a raised glyph. Odd departure in style, he thought. No high relief. This one was engraved directly into the flat surface of the stele. He lay his cheek close for a better line of sight. Not even bas-relief.
He felt certain that the characters Sosanna had mistaken for writing would turn out to be inset maps of the precise place where his father had found the first stele. His mother’s deathbed recounting had mentioned the pillar and the pool and that his father had babbled of Supay, the Inca god of death and the underworld. And then an animal had killed him. In his mother’s fanciful terms, his father had bloodless, scorched claw marks from head to heel. Wasn’t Supay sometimes depicted as a tigre or a puma? In Egypt, it had been Anubis, the jackal-headed servant of death. And here in Connemara it was a wolf. The adaptation of the myth was plain: a feral animal, stylized to fit the culture.
Reaching up with the camera, he held the lens the approximate distance from the intricate characters for which he had pre-set the focus and managed to depress the button with one hand. He wanted very much to try and remove the stele as he had removed the one in Egypt, and as his father must certainly have removed the one in Peru, but that would be a betrayal of Sosanna McCabe. A week ago he wouldn’t have cared and he might have risked the uproar of just taking the damn thing with him. Things certainly had changed.
Remembering the magnetic tug when he had removed the stele at Giza, he worked his way around the pylon to size up the two blank faces. Vague encrustations marked them, and he wondered if they covered an interface into which the other steles would lock. As gingerly as a sloth, he backed down into the boat, put the camera away, and lifted one of the steles from his backpack. Avoiding Sosanna’s questioning eyes, he reclaimed his place on the column and pressed the Peruvian tablet on first one facing, then the other. There was no affinity, magnetic or mechanical, to hold it there. Acrobatically he scraped at the encrustations and tried again. But the stele grated down the pylon as soon as the pressure of his fingers eased.
Frustrated, he settled back into the boat.
“Where did you get that?” she asked as he slid the stele into the backpack.
“It came from Peru. An Inca ruin near Cuzco. My father died for it.”
“How dreadful. I’m sorry.”
“I never knew him.”
“Oh. Then . . . this is why you’re ”
“No. It has nothing to do with why I’m here.”
“I see. You said somethin’ about a series when I bought you the sketch. Three in the series, you said.”
He pulled up the Egyptian stele. “This one came from Giza, Egypt. From a pylon like this one, in a pond like this one. Three pylons, three pools, spread around the world.”
“What does it mean?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be tempting your father to make room for one more grave in his cemetery.”
“Speakin’ of which, I’m not sure how long he’ll be gone.”
“We can go back now. I think I know what the Thiollaney Merriu stele has on it. There’s nothing more I can do until I figure things out.”
She dipped the oars and started to row. “But . . . what does this have to do with my father?”
“Facts get twisted into myths. Your father knows the myths.”
“I doubt my father could even find Peru and Egypt on a map.”
“He may not know about those sites, but he knows about this one ”
Suddenly Sosanna tensed and the oars stopped mid-stroke. “Not this again,” she murmured, splashing asymmetrically, trying to recapture leverage.
“Eh? Again?” He looked over the side. “No GalÁ pagos tortoise. We must be caught on a sandbar or a branch. Let me try.”
He shifted alongside her and made an awkward attempt to use both oars. Then they each took one and strained. Then he lifted one oar out of the lock and probed the water, knifing as far down as he could reach, stem to stern.
“I don’t think that’s the problem,” she said.
“What is it then?”
“I’m not sure, but it happened before.”
“And . . . ?”
“And it started spinnin’.”
“The boat?”
“Well, not me. Of course it was the boat. It broke free and started spinnin’ like a compass needle. I barely cleared the whirlpool or whatever it was, and when I got to shore I saw where the rocks had scraped it.”
He puckered his lips doubtfully and looked over the gunwale at the pond. “It’s not breaking free.”
“You have a gift for the obvious, Lane Andersen.”
“Logic deems it necessary. Observe how methodically we approach this problem.”
“We. Thank you, but I’ll do the worryin’ for both of us, since you don’t seem to take it seriously.”
“Tut-tut. It’s not like I don’t have experience with these waters. I’ve been in your grotto with scuba gear ”
“Mercy. You’re insane.”
“You knew that already. Nevertheless, we’re going to approach this rationally. The boat is stuck. It’s not a magical charm or a pooka’s trick. It’s something underwater. Since we can’t determine what it is from here, or move off it, I’m going into the pond to check.”
“This is where logic fails.”
“The other alternative is to wait for your father to come home.”
“I’ll hold your shirt,” she said. “Are you goin’ to strip quite naked? I’d prefer you didn’t.”
“I’ll leave my Fruit-of-the-Looms on.”
“Your what?”
“An expression. I don’t need you to hold anything. Just watch that the backpack doesn’t go overboard.”
She only looked when he had his back to her, but her mind was racing with apprehension over the pond: all her father’s warnings, and her previous misadventure with this very boat spinning in a vortex, and her mother snatching her back to shore that day she had waded out, asking if she saw the weedy walls of the green castle deep down by the Pillar and when she said “no” telling her she shouldn’t go in the pond. And now this foolhardy if intrepid man was going down into the black depths of a place even her mother avoided.
It was no trick to get overboard; the boat was rock steady. With a barely heard inhalation, he swung over the gunwale and went under. Instantly Sosanna felt the craft free up. It could not have been from something he had done. Not that quickly. She watched the raft of bubbles disintegrate and waited.
Couldn’t he tell the boat was floating freely? Why didn’t he come up? She slipped one thole pin out and banged the oar on the inside of the hull. Come up, dammit! Then she saw the oddly yellowed face rising, features distended by the force of the water, closed eyelids bulging, catfish whiskers of air streaming from its fluttering lips. For a moment she didn’t know who it was what it was but then Lane Andersen burst free, grinning, triumphant.
“Logic one, emotion zero!” he announced and held up a chain of brown and silver sea growth. “The stuff is swirling around down there. You’ve been rowing in the Sargasso Sea.”
Logic? It wasn’t logical at all to Sosanna McCabe. Were they so weak that they couldn’t make the boat budge in seaweed? She had never seen seaweed like that in the pond, but she had seen it washed up on the beach by the ocean tide. And why hadn’t the oar encountered it when he probed? But before she could voice her objections, he jerked upright, treading briskly. The water around him looked agitated now. In alarm she called out, asking what was wrong. And then he was flailing furiously, kicking hard and going down.
She was riveted on the spot, black water glassing quickly but just as quickly dimpling again, as if he were coming back up. She saw a flash of yellow, a hand she thought, and then there were roiling shadows within the gloom. It must have been the shock that enhanced her vision, because she had
never seen so far into the water before. In fact she completely lost track of her circumstances, as evidenced by the fact that she kicked off her shoes and braced herself as though she would actually dive in after him.
It wasn’t the stippling of the water surface that finally provoked her, however. It was the sudden deadly calm. Three . . . four . . . five seconds of terminal flatness. She reacted with blind instinct. Over the side and down, down, down she went. Passion one, logic zero . . .
***
He remembered a Moonwalk at a carnival somewhere in northern California. It had been set up indoors at a fairgrounds building by itinerant members of the commune who had taken temporary work there. He must have been eight or nine, and there was a storm and a power failure and in the dark of the Moonwalk all the kids started screaming and tumbling over each other. There was a loss of up and down, a sense of suffocation, a tangling of limbs and ballooning vinyl hurling them into panic and chaos. That was what he felt in the pond of Thiollaney Merriu three fathoms into blackness.
And it wasn’t just the seizure of his limbs and the drag of the sea growth. He felt hands. Afterward the question would be when did he feel the hands? But of course they must have been hers Sosanna’s. It was hard to sort out because he was nearly unconscious when she got to him, the air beginning to retch from his lungs. With all the twisting weeds you could imagine you were being pulled down by orchestrated malevolence. And the marks on his ankles, they could have been the constrictions of fingers if you wanted to believe that or merely the windings of vegetation, if you did not.
He did not. It was some kind of thermal, he would argue, a current, a tide lifting great chains of sea growth to the surface. Weren’t the coastal Irish always talking about the fabulous and uncertain tides off Thiollaney Merriu, whose unrecorded surges could be more dynamic than the ones at the Bay of Fundy?
She barely responded to his ridiculous assertion or to his attempts to thank her, because she was trying to sort out another shock. How had she saved him? How could she go down all that way, tear him free and bring them both to the surface through a storm of writhing kelp?
She couldn’t swim.
She tried to make light of it, not knowing if the selfless miracle she had performed was good or bad. And when he sneezed after assuring her that the phenomenon had not been some preternatural frenzy, she repeated that he was still allergic to truth. But lying there, draped breathlessly over the weathered seats, they came up one miracle short. Because another figure was pounding relentlessly toward them through the tombstones. Brone McCabe had run all the way from the house where, standing dismayed in the bedroom window, he had seen them drag themselves into the boat.
42
It was an ugly scene, and it took a bizarre twist in some ways beyond anything else that happened that bizarre day. Sosanna rowed back in slow motion while Lane pulled his clothes on, and then they dragged the boat out like galley slaves waiting for the lash to fall. They turned the hull over, tucked the oars neatly beneath, and stood wordlessly looking at the ground. All this while Brone McCabe wheezed around the pond to meet them. But when he arrived he paced to and fro, delivering a contradictory mix of ranting and gratitude. Lane expected the tirade, of course. It was the gratitude that mystified him, until the old reprobate strung his ambivalence together:
“Betrayal’s too good a word, Sosanna, and Andersen . . . Andersen you’ll never know how close you come to meeting ultimate justice at the hands of Brone McCabe! Still, I can’t deny my debt to you for savin’ my daughter . . .”
Sosanna darted Lane a stern look. Let him think what he thinks. She couldn’t swim; her father had seen them struggling into the boat; Lane must have saved her, that was all. Let him think it, she conveyed. If Lane had saved her, it might save them both now.
But it didn’t save his conscience. Later, lying alone on the slat futon in his rental cottage, he felt weighed down by emotional complexities. How had he gotten so indebted to her? Vaguely he realized he was at an impasse with the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu. Either he must take the stele outright for microscopic examination or else accept the fact that he would probably never be able to pinpoint the third location in Peru. And now Sosanna had saved his life. Suddenly all his inclinations were to leave Connemara as soon as possible.
And if he left Ireland it would certainly be better for her. She would make her peace at home and stay in Connemara, because he was a complicating factor in her life, a blind alley.
And then there was the dream. He stared into the bedroom where the green pillow lay. That object was a genuine phenomenon. He was looking forward to having Professor Claiborne at Willmont analyze whatever herbs were inside, if he could get it through customs. But Claiborne wouldn’t be able to identify the racial memory or the telepathy that appeared to be so strong here in Connemara. The dream had come to both he and Sosanna, and there was just a small part of him that would be glad to quit Ireland out of fear that it really had been a premonition. And as long as he was being so bone-weary candid why not admit that it had occurred to him this afternoon that the near disaster in the churchyard pond might have fulfilled the premonition? Of course, she had saved him, whereas in the dream he had tried to save her. But perhaps her father’s later misinterpretation of who the rescuer was fulfilled the dream as scripted.
He informed Cooney M’Gill that he might be driving back to Shannon Airport in the morning, tipped him for the linen service, ate a last hearty meal at Glenna’s Kitchen, and by the time he got to Buskers for a final pint found that word of his plans had preceded him.
“I hear the American is takin’ leave of our fair village in order to avoid the contest,” Enis Browne piped.
“Not surprisin’,” Laughlin O’Brien replied. “Seein’ as how he didn’t reply to the note.”
It was in his mailbox. He read it for the first time when he got back to the cottage from Buskers. Read all his mail, which consisted of two flyers pizza and dry cleaning apparently left the day he had checked in. The note, unsigned, gave him a time and a place: tomorrow, noon, on the road to Thiollaney Merriu.
He thought: I’ll wave from the window of Aer Lingus, Macloy.
And as ominous as a fateful response to that evasion, there came a slow heavy knock at the door. It had to be his nemesis. And it was. But not Flann Macloy. The other nemesis.
“A word with you, if you don’t mind,” Brone McCabe said.
He looked tired and defeated, the skin of his cheekbones white from the sag of his massive jowls, his burnt almond eyes (Sosanna’s eyes in oversize) lightless, his lips uneven in repose. Lane backed away from the door and McCabe took a single exaggerated step inside.
“You’ll understand, comin’ to see you is not the easiest thing I’ve done of late.”
“I didn’t pick our fight.”
A grunt meant to do for a laugh. “I s’pose it’s different in the city, but out here when you step onto a man’s land, you’re in his parlor. And now I’ve come to yours, hat in hand. Sosanna is my jewel, you can see that, man, and . . . well, you ”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Of course you did.”
“You don’t owe me, McCabe. I didn’t do anything for you. I talked your daughter into rowing me out there.”
The grunt this time had no humor at all. “And what did you learn, if I might ask?”
“Nothing I didn’t already know.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“You’ve got a very old artifact there. On a bad day I might have borrowed it for a closer look. I don’t suppose you’d consider letting me take it down temporarily?”
“Hear me, Andersen. I haven’t come here to quarrel with you, but I’ll kill the man who tries to meddle with the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu.”
Lane drew himself up, scrutinizing McCabe as though for the first time. “It’s probably pagan, you know. There must have been an unholy alliance between old beliefs and the new. In fact, I can show you a nasty letter that nails it. Catholic
ism was a hard sell a mere century and a half ago.”
“Don’t care how you label it. It has the authority of dominions and thrones behind it.”
“Are you that religious?”
“I am.”
“I don’t want to desecrate anything, McCabe.”
“Then take my word for it, you’ve crossed a dangerous line. Any time you go near that pond you’re a threat to things you don’t understand. And I’m the Watcher of Thiollaney Merriu, if you please. You don’t want to underestimate that. However, as I said, I didn’t come here to rattle armor.”
Lane, still trying to guess the purpose of the visit, gestured to a chair; but Brone didn’t seem to notice.
“My daughter says she’s movin’ out . . . my daughter, which I love dearly, says she doesn’t want to hate me, so she’s movin’ out. What d’ya think of that? She says the argument we had this afternoon was just the final straw. She says . . . well, she’s tired of bein’ my grown-up child, she says. Wants freedom.” Another grunt. “Women and freedom I don’t know what that means. But I’m here to make you an offer for a promise.” He began to tap the cap held in his hand on his thigh.
They stared at each other awkwardly, Brone nodding, trying to elicit a sign of willingness, though he had not yet defined his offer. A motorcycle passed on the road.
“Here ‘tis, then,” McCabe said. “If you want to see my daughter anytime at the house, well, maybe that will be all right. But not in the churchyard. You’ve got to swear you’ll not go out on the pond again.”
43
God knows what Una could hear in a storm, considering the things the wind did to her and the way she felt vibrations in the earth. It made Brone shudder. Water vitrified her vision, even when she only stared down into depths from the land, and now the slashing sheets of rain effectively surrounded the house as if they were submerged. She went from window to window. It reminded him of Mr. Billy.
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