PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “Una,” he called, “let’s go to bed.”

  She opened the heavy front door a crack, flooding the room with chill moist air. He sprang from his chair, but Sosanna’s sudden tread caused both he and Una to hesitate. She was coming down from her room on some errand to the refrigerator.

  “You’ll get wet, mother,” she said at the foot of the stairs and pressed the door shut with her palm.

  Brone had not mentioned his visit to Lane Andersen to Sosanna. What could he say? Her threat to move out hung like a work in progress, but if the Yank came, presumably she would temper her hostility.

  “Sosi . . .” Brone said when she had finished her pedestrian errand, but she passed on up the stairs with a firm, “Good night, father,” and moments later her bedroom door shut with finality.

  Blood flashed to his face. Fighting for self-control, he started up the steps. It was a time for concessions. He must admit that and reason with her. In ten years, twenty at most (unless he truly was immortal), she would be caring for her parents in this house. What was the point of uprooting her life? He would tell her that. They needed her. He needed her.

  But at the top of the stairs he felt the draft catch up to him from below. Una had opened the front door again, and as he wheeled back down he saw that untimely thunder had concealed the sound of its closing again. “Una,” he breathed with a tremor in his voice, but she was gone.

  It was darker on the ground than in the sky, and she was already out of sight when he got outside. The sky moved like huge stage sets backlit by pocket lightning. He kept pausing as he ran, straining wide-eyed for a gliding presence in the flickers that lashed out. A tempest like this one was a siren song to her. She blended with it in a way that left him fearing that her native element was reclaiming her.

  He crossed the footbridge, already soaked, his trousers imbibed like a chamois and wrapped around his thighs. Swiping the hair out of his eyes he hurried among jagged rows of tombstones as yellow as old teeth running with saliva. The cannonade above him canceled what the wind failed to sweep away as he called her name.

  She was wearing a white blouse, and he was confused by the several mausoleum seraphs and gargoyles that blanched white in the micro-flickers. He beetled across the rows into the dead heart of the dead churchyard and there boxed the compass as he edged around in a circle waiting for light. Again he had the sense of marble moving, of water rising. Small flash floods were engulfing depressions and the settled rills below the grotto as they sometimes did. She might have sought a higher point on the cliff, he thought, shuddering to imagine her ecstasy in the storm.

  Slogging, slipping, he made his way around the pond. He had the disturbing feeling that the Pillar was winding him in like a gray maypole. On the other side he beheld the shattered ash trees, their raw wounds gleaming in the storm. And then came the grotto, and now it seemed that the storm relented momentarily, that there was a deliberate silence provided for his meek appeal:

  “Una?”

  He studied the bulging boulders as if they would betray animation, and he had never felt the presence of malevolence so strongly. She could not be in there. He took one step in, two, passing between the sarsen stones, gray and smooth as leviathans. He was standing ankle deep in a liquid that felt too viscous to be water. Mud, he told himself, but he knew the grotto was scoured free by colluding updrafts. There couldn’t be any mud. And then, as subtly as a pinprick, he caught the faintest whiff of retting, but the next inhalation stabbed him like a needle up the nose. He backpedaled and fell, plunging

  wrist-deep in the sticky liquid. Like some frantic lizard, he windmilled out of the grotto and lay gasping in the torrents on the very slab of rock where he had once presented a miserable sacrifice to the beast of Thiollaney Merriu.

  When he looked up, Una was moving among the tombstones in a series of broken images caused by a stutter of lightning. But there was something colorless and empty, a void, a silhouette, advancing after her that was not illuminated by the flashes.

  He sprang to his feet again, screaming at her, his voice as empty of sound as the silhouette was of light. Thunder was canceling him out again. He caught another glimpse of her, leaning down, he thought, and he couldn’t tell if the stalking thing was there and she was stroking it or

  He ran as he hadn’t run in half a century, his eyes fixed on that one point of final perception. Never blinking in the blurring rain, he cleared ditches and sodden plots and nearly bowled her over when she straightened. Her back was to him, and she merely moved forward to the next grave and leaned over again. She was reading the stones.

  When he grasped her by the shoulders and faced her to him she was serene. “What were their names?” she asked sweetly.

  “Whose?” he thundered back in the same register as the storm.

  “Your other wives.”

  “Una . . . listen to me. It was always you . . . only you.” She waited patiently while he caught his breath. “The other wives were all you. Each time you went away and came back, you forgot there was a previous time. But every now and then you remember somethin’ from before. You’re rememberin’ yourself, that’s all . . . you’ve been my wife before. There is no grave for you. None. There never was. A grave for me and none for you, my love . . . my great love, my unfeelin’ love.”

  She looked at him with that unfathomable blankness that forever kept him from knowing her thoughts. And he dreaded saying more, helping her clarify what she was really after: that thing her subconscious imagined was wrapped around a corpse her own corpse the red cape he had captured in order to claim her by the laws that bound the sidhe, and which could free her forever back to the sea.

  “Every time . . . it was you, Una. You left but you had to come back. There are no dead wives. Just one livin’ one I can’t quite seem to hang onto. You know I can’t throw your cape away, and I know you must search for it. But it isn’t with the dead. I swear to you. It isn’t with the dead.”

  44

  He got her dried off and into bed, still in her dream-like state. And she lay there with her eyes open while the storm settled into a steady drumming on the roof and the south face of the house. He couldn’t stand her staring like that, not really there beside him, but an alien thing he could never possess, and at last he went downstairs.

  He moved comfortably through the darkness, opening the refrigerator, taking out the milk, pouring some in a pan on the stove, dropping in a heel of bread, turning on the gas. He missed Billy; felt him in the room, he thought. When Sosanna’s voice broke behind him he knocked the pan off the spirit ring.

  “It’s mother, isn’t it?” she said from the shadows of the hearth. She had been sitting there, bare feet up on the cool stone the way she used to place them as a little girl.

  Brone centered the pan over the ring again. “She went out and got wet, that’s all.”

  “I’m talking about the graves that were opened. It was mother that dug them up.”

  The blue gas flame illuminated nothing, and he was glad they couldn’t see each other’s faces. “Now why would you say that?”

  “All those graves opened, it wasn’t the Water Wolf. It was mother.”

  “Such a thing to imagine ”

  “Don’t . . . don’t . . . don’t. We’re way past tellin’ lies, father. We’re on the edge of silence, because that’s the only truth between us. Help me pull us back from the edge, father. I don’t want to leave here with a silence.”

  For long moments there was just the wooden spoon stirring. “Some,” he said at last. “She dug up some, I think. The ones with female names maybe.”

  Sosanna considered. “They were all female.”

  “Mostly.”

  “But why? Because you were married before?”

  “For the last time, I wasn’t married before. Call it a lie and use it to drive a wedge between us, if that’s what you want, but I’d be lyin’ to tell you otherwise.”

  “Then why would she do such a crazy thing? There must be some rhym
e or reason to it. Even the mad have method, father.”

  “Why are you askin’ me?” He shoved the pan onto a cold ring and snapped out the flame.

  The smell of milk, slightly burnt, hung in the air. Brone just stood there. And then Sosanna got it, a glimpse of the truth, and expelled her breath in a sigh of dismay. “All those years I’ve heard the nonsense. That she was . . . different. Not really mortal, they said. My mother not a human bein’? She’s got the proper number of arms and legs, I thought. She suckled me, didn’t she? She’s loved me, taught me, cried with me, laughed with me! Tell me there’s nothin’ to it, father.”

  “Stop it,” he said.

  “Uh . . . stop it you say? I wish I could.”

  “For God’s sake, lass.” He planted his meaty palms on the edges of the stove. “You’ve known nothin’ else. Whatever is is right. How could it be otherwise? Do you think anythin’s changed by your speculatin’?”

  Long pause. Then a timid, “What does this make me?”

  He spun around now, went to his daughter, hugged her to his breast, the words rumbling into her: “Why, you’ve got two horns, lass, did you not know that? Two horns big as Belgian Blue bulls and pointy ears and a wart on your nose the size of my thumb

  . . .” And he went on sarcastically like that, how she wasn’t at all what she had thought she was all her life, the headstrong wonder-child, the over-achiever, the flawless face in the mirror, bright student, heart-breaker, groomer of cats, player of pianos, wearer of jeans, wearer of skirts, wearer of smiles and frowns and a thousand roles in a thousand imagined games they had played played with her mother too and now she was starting to laugh a little between tears, even though he was hugging her hard enough to break bones, because he said he had noticed how smoke came out of her ears during the full moon and her teeth turned purple whenever the tide was in. And when she had sniffed back her tears in a way he had not heard in a dozen years and gone up to bed, Brone McCabe sat up all night at the table until the dawn crept in and nameless shadows hid.

  45

  Lane told himself it didn’t change anything, but he knew it did. Brone McCabe had opened the door to his house and slammed the gate on the churchyard at the same time, and in exchange he had given his promise not to enter the pond. He still planned on leaving for Shannon Airport tomorrow afternoon, but he liked the idea of driving up to Thiollaney Merriu and knocking on the door of the house. How do you do, Ms. McCabe, care for a little passion? I’m afraid we’ll have to forego our usual lifesaving class in the pond . . . She must have given the old man hell, and he himself must have featured high on her list of things that were important to her.

  Cooney M’Gill had left a bottle of Irish white wine in the cupboard. The wine was unconscionable, a failed attempt to grow quality grapes in the south and now an overstock to be given away with weekly rentals, but Lane kicked back with it on the slat futon and tossed his shoes through the bedroom doorway. He wondered if he would actually drag himself out for road bowling by noon. The wine went down warm and somehow not bad. He killed half the bottle before it began to taste like raisins suspended in horse liniment. It was starting to rain. Road bowling was going to turn into a shot put contest on the ‘morrow. When he rolled into bed, there was the Dream Pillow. “What the hell . . . one for the muddy road,” he said and pulled it under his buzzing head.

  ***

  There were no false illusions of waking this time. The rain and the dream carried him through the air to Thiollaney Merriu and set him down in another year, another century. The landscape and the light were as murky as an aging Flemish painting: Bruegel monsters, Magpie on the Gallows, hellish stuff he had seen on a wall somewhere, museum prints, university library transported now from a place he hadn’t liked to a place he didn’t like. Because he knew what was just over the rise toward the village not much more than a hundred yards away. Cinnfhail. Cinnfhail the workhouse. Cinnfhail the insane asylum. Or perhaps an even earlier incarnation, as Obadiah Byrne’s letter mentioned that the building had been refurbished twice.

  And then the lightning flashed, and he received no less a shock than if its

  mega-volts had traveled through his body. Because the tombstones of Thiollaney Merriu flowed white as dragon’s teeth past the border of the churchyard he knew and up the hill by the hundreds toward the old village, cut off by the crest and the expected gray bulk of Cinnfhail rising, rising towering higher than he had imagined. The beamed ceiling he had glimpsed through the lancet window in the first dream had betrayed none of this earlier superstructure. Bristling with spires, embellished with contorted stone figures and curiously disproportioned crosses, there could be no doubt of what it had originally been. Unmistakably, Cinnfhail had begun as a church.

  He plodded in darkness toward it, plodded up the rows of sharply etched and unworn tombstones that no longer existed in the twenty-first century. This was more vivid than the other visions, and his brain was connecting things far too rationally for a dream. His clothes itched as the rain dried off, and the acrid smoke tickled his throat. He recalled what Doreen Brynn had said: that Cinnfhail meant “from the head of the cliff” and that the village had moved away from Thiollaney Merriu and that superstitious farmers still filled wells and blasted stumps and bricked in certain fireplaces in the oldest cottages because they believed that the whole of western Ireland was riddled with tunnels that led to the sea. Perhaps they didn’t lead to the sea but only to Thiollaney Merriu.

  And where were the dead who lay beneath these markers? Had the conqueror worm done such a thorough job that no trace under or above ground remained in the year 2002? And even if such an absurdity could be true, why were there still two hundred years of gravestones closer to the Pillar and the pond?

  A woman half-lifting a whimpering child by its extended arm came over the hill, saw him and fled at right angles. Another group, men included, scampered to the seaward edge of the graves and weaved off toward the grotto. Screams and bellowing and the roar of a crowd came to him now, and the greasy smell of torches. The crest of the hill was limned crimson as he topped it and saw the horror of Cinnfhail.

  There were three human figures hanging from irregular spires on the well-illumined façade: one quite still, one jerking spasmodically, one kicking for all he was worth (which was very little at this point). Freer silhouettes toiled above them where ropes encircled the flÈches, and below was the crowd feeding off the spectacle with sighs of ambiguous awe. Still others swarmed in an out of the structure carrying broken altarpieces, and some dragged terrified celebrants by the hair or wrists. They wore button-down clothing, stockings, buckles and bodices, centuries out of fashion making Lane centuries out of fashion.

  Central in that moving sea was a rigidly posed man in black cassock and the purple biretta of a bishop. He was reading relentlessly in a stentorian voice from the scroll held open in the torchlight by an accompanying liturgist. Lane heard him quite plainly but did not understand a word of the Irish and Latin. Nor did he need to since it was evident that an edict or a summary proclamation was being carried out. And that should have made him doubly cautious. He remembered the hand that had shot out of the scupper in the dream when he had visited Cinnfhail the insane asylum and how he had been unable to shake it loose from his ankle. The people in these dreams had real power over him. Nevertheless, he passed down the hill through the final row of markers for a closer look.

  A child, one of several who were pulling down gravestones, saw him first. The clear-eyed girl began gibbering and ran to tug at her mother’s apron strings. Hostile gazes multiplied in Lane’s direction, and had it not been for the first spray of pulverized stone raining down from the heights of Cinnfhail and driving the mob back, he might have been taken in hand right then and there. Climbers had begun the roof’s defacement.

  Barely had the crowd looked up when something gray and winged tumbled end over end, hitting the cobblestones and splitting into three sections. A great cry went up. Several men rushed in with hammers
and iron bars to shatter the remains of the statue. Through the rain and the oily smoke of sizzling torches Lane made out the thickened leering features of a sculpted demon.

  He knew the thing was an object of veneration. This had not been a mere gargoyle. And the church that was being sacked while its officiants hung from its fantastic spires was not an abomination entirely removed from the Catholic diaspora. It was what Obadiah Byrnes had hinted at: the unholy spawn of pagan Ireland and Rome.

  Why not? The tainted blends of SanterÍ a or the eighteenth century Kongo cult of Vita Kimpa or a hundred hybridized religions in other parts of the world had done no less with the Holy See. The superstitious Irish would need more than a few centuries to sort out its reformation. Druids or other pagans, half-converted, would have put their own stamp on things. The cultists or occultists who erected Cinnfhail might have endured for a millennium or longer after Christianity was introduced and come to worship all power whether darkness or light. And here at Thiollaney Merriu there was a wellspring whose roots Lane still did not entirely understand but which had lasted until this purge he was witnessing now. It was why the burial ground was called a churchyard, because the graves had once begun here at the compromised church of Cinnfhail and stretched toward the pond of the Pillar.

  He began to edge away. This was not a dream to be shared by strangers in a strange time. He dared not break into full flight, because the mob was mad with excitement and flinging itself at every new distraction. A fourth miserable soul was culled out of his hiding place, and Lane watched grimly as another rope snaked down from the spires and the victim’s hoarse protests were extinguished in a sudden gurgle. Up, up, he went, kicking and clutching in the crudest kind of strangulation, snatching at one of the peculiarly disproportioned crosses until his hand was smashed with a hammer by one of the hangmen on the heights. And the crosses Lane could now see that they were staggered in a zigzag pattern at the roofline. The upper were traditional Latin crosses; the lower were inverted.