PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  51

  Not since his mother’s funeral had Lane pondered the insolubles of his life with such septic self-doubt. If you’re pissed off because you didn’t have someone to play catch with when you were growing up, then ask yourself why you take it out on people who try to understand what’s beyond reality. That was the second to last serious thing his mother had ever said to him. Beyond reality? What the hell did that mean? The fuzzy-brained enablers of his mother’s coterie got beyond reality through chemical journeys. Here in Connemara beyond reality meant that half a man was all dead, sucked into the earth like a bit of shredded beef from the serrated maw of an architectural monstrosity buried to its spire beneath a transient pond.

  Lane felt wrong somehow felt. That was another ominous sign. Feelings overwhelmed him like a disease: the national infection of the superstitious Irish. He wanted to see children and to overhear prattle and to eat French fries and ice cream while watching “The Simpsons,” because things “beyond reality” had gotten out of hand.

  He was returning up the road with no name that he had traveled back and forth since arriving in Darrig. His mud-caked feet were muted on the asphalt stretch near Cooney’s cottages, and a stele was clutched in each hand, making him look lobster-clawed. Ahead of him was his car with the door still open, just as he had left it when he rushed off in pursuit of Sosanna. Lord, but he must be in love. He had never wanted someone so badly in his life. Wanted, of all things, her good opinion of him, as if only that could possibly redeem him.

  “Well, now, and how was your road bowling with the young gallant?” came suddenly from inside the steel-blue Punto as he reached out to slam the door.

  Abban sat up in the front seat, his pipe tumbling to his lap. He brushed away embers, muttering.

  Lane leaned the steles against the front wheel. “What part of ‘begone’ don’t you understand?”

  “And here I thought you might be grateful for me givin’ you the winnin’ technique.”

  Weariness and defeat weighed down Lane’s face, and he stared blankly as the little man crossed his legs and leaned one elbow on the steering wheel. The ginger smell of the pipe now exited the car in a blue wraith. Abban’s merry face suddenly went to “o’s” of consternation.

  “Eh? What’s this? Hardly a look of triumph for the new record holder. Did the loser not take it well? You can always give him a return, you know.”

  “The loser is . . .”

  “What?”

  “Retired from the game.”

  Abban sucked his cheek, peered sharply. “Is he, now? A shame, ‘tis.”

  The little man knew, Lane thought. Somehow he had found out. He just didn’t know that anyone else knew.

  “And how are you doin’ with the young lady?” asked Abban.

  “I don’t remember telling you about that.” Abban shrugged, inferring the obvious, that it was a small village, and Lane added in frustration, “We’re swell. Getting married just as soon as I slit my wrists and Hell freezes over.”

  “Won’t freeze without water in it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just an observation.”

  “You know about the pond.”

  “Can you move that much water without it bein’ noticed? And you’re wearin’ a good deal of mud, of course. S’far as I know, you weren’t road bowlin’ in the rain.”

  Lane sighed, leaned back on the car with his eyes closed. He heard a bottle swish and Abban’s throaty gasp of satisfaction.

  “Care for a drink, Mr. Andersen? You look tired.”

  “I’ve got to figure things out.”

  “Another snooze on that Dream Pillow of yours might be worth hours of figurin’ in your present condition.”

  Lane allowed his head to sag back and began to laugh softly. “It was you . . .”

  “Me what?”

  “You put the Dream Pillow in my room.”

  “Did I?”

  “It’s full of herbs, and you’re a drug-dealing reprobate.”

  “Am I?”

  Lane’s head came forward, his eyelids rolling open doll-like. “You put the dreams in my head. That was you too.”

  “You’re goin’ much too fast for an old man.”

  “Not some genetic memory lingering in Darrig’s descendants, it was you all the time. You’re a telepath an ESPer. But . . . how did you know so much about Cinnfhail and the grotto?”

  The bottle swished. “I’ll not deny some input, no. But you give me much too much credit. The pillow has some fine ingredients in it. Collected by yours truly from places I shan’t mention out of deference to your sensibilities.”

  “. . . and you a priest.”

  “A priest in Ireland has to adapt to what’s here. Just like the Church did.”

  Lane gazed coldly into Abban’s twinkling eyes. The little man held the bottle out for leverage as he worked his way off the front seat.

  “I don’t like this, old man. I know all about magic, and it’s never magic. It’s always a fraud of style over substance. You’ve taken your genuine psychic abilities and dressed them up with hallucinogens.”

  “If I’ve misdirected you a wee bit, ‘twas all in fun. An old man mustn’t be denied his harmless amusements.”

  “Harmless? Macloy is dead!”

  “His doin’, not mine. You don’t trespass the Water Wolf.”

  “Don’t . . . don’t use that.” Lane lifted a warning finger. He was his own master again. “You know, you almost had me, Abban. You and all the other blarney-spinners around here. For a while I forgot why I came to Darrig, and who I am, and what I have to do, but I’ve got it now.”

  “Grand attitude, lad!”

  “And I’m going back to the McCabes. I haven’t done anything wrong. Sosanna can take me or leave me.”

  “That’s the spirit! Love is my favorite sport, right behind fisticuffs.”

  “Don’t think you’re finessing me, Abban. I’ve been walking around in a kind of stupor, and now it’s over. I don’t know how you do half of what you do it takes me awhile to expose frauds but I promise you, I will figure it all out.”

  “Well spoke, lad.”

  “What gave you away is your love of tricks. I could show you a thing or two about tricks.”

  “If you please.”

  “Abban?”

  “My undivided attention is yours.”

  “Begone.”

  ***

  The little Fiat raised a whine on the asphalt and a roar on the dirt section of the road, and whether or not Sosanna heard the noise or saw the dust, she was hurrying out of the house before the car bounced to a stop over the several ruts that bled off past their letter box. And then, as if they had both acted precipitously and were having second thoughts, they hesitated: he with one hand on the wheel; she catching her breath as the dust floated back toward the road.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, planting one foot on the ground. “Blanket apologies to cover all my sins and omissions. You list ‘em, I’ll apologize. But I can’t apologize for putting the steles on the Pillar. I didn’t ”

  “I know.”

  “Then ”

  She glanced at the house, hurried around to the passenger side, got in. “Shut up and drive,” she said.

  They drove in silence without exchanging a look, and when they got to his rental cottage, she said “not here.” He drove through town, turned right on the last surfaced street, pulled over. With a crisp twist of the key, he shut the engine off. This was it. Time for his big declaration.

  And then she blurted, “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

  He clamped his lips shut. Of course Flann Macloy’s death should be the central thing on their minds. Dramatic. Unexpected. Wrong moment for romance. Give it a few seconds.

  “Father didn’t call the gardai,” she said.

  “They’ll want to recover the body.”

  “He’ll not allow them to search.”

  “He won’t have a choice.”

 
She looked across at him, eyes still preoccupied with death in Darrig. “Why won’t he? Have you told anyone?”

  “You mean your father’s not going to report it?”

  “What good would that do? They’ll know he’s gone soon enough. They’ll think he was ashamed on account of the road bowlin’ maybe. That he just up and left.”

  Lane shook his head. “What about his family?”

  “His mother will take it hard. I’m not sayin’ it’s right.”

  “Then why ”

  “People die! People go away. What’s the difference? It hurts no matter what.” She was shaking, and she jumped when he tried to take her hand.

  “Sosanna, what’s changed? You’re acting like your father.”

  She looked at him wide-eyed but still distantly. “Didn’t you see? There’s a . . . a structure down there. I’d swear it was bloody Westminster, if it weren’t for those horrible spires and demon things. I never got a good look before I came to you . . . before I accused you falsely.” Her eyes came back to the present for a moment and she added, “Forgive me that.”

  He took her hand firmly this time and said “not a problem” as offhandedly as he could.

  The haunted gaze returned to her eyes. “Father is right. No one should be buried in the churchyard. No one should go near the Pillar. Just standing there was like being in Limbo. If only we could flood it again.”

  “That’s what I was trying to do.”

  “I know, I know.”

  He wanted to tell her he still didn’t agree about not reporting Macloy’s death, but hadn’t he himself left a virtual Wagnerian opera of bodies in Cairo? Even though it had been his neck in a country whose justice was unpredictable and subject to sectarian politics and bribes, the point was he had seen fit to rise above the law.

  “Sosanna, there’s a ruin at the bottom of the basin, that’s all. Something that was part of a global religion so long ago that I’m still trying to believe it myself. It’s why I came here. Whatever it was, however astounding and powerful, the only thing left now besides those ruins are the distorted myths that are a part of Connemara.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Believe me, proving it to you is now my first priority.” He had her eyes again, a doe-like softness and vulnerability, and so the moment was right for pouring out his heart, but what he said was, “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “I did tell someone. Or at least someone knows. The retired priest Abban I just saw him, and he knew about Macloy somehow. He seems to know everything. In fact, he’s the one who gave me the green pillow.”

  “Abban? I’ve never heard of an Abban. A retired priest, you say?”

  “Right here in Darrig.”

  “You must be mistaken. He’s not from around here. I’d know him if he was.”

  Priest unfrocked. And suddenly Lane wanted to get to the bottom of the little man’s identity. He wanted to hear Sosanna ask the old reprobate who he was. They were parked on Kerry Street. It wasn’t far to the cottage among the oaks. He started the car.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I want you to meet Abban.”

  He turned left on the dirt road a stone’s throw ahead, and after a short drive turned left again into the lane. Only where was the cottage? He saw the oaks, clustered and towering, but the sunken lane where they had grown was flooded. Black water spread out as far back as he could see.

  “This was dry,” he muttered.

  “Well, you’re right about that. I’ve never seen this area underwater before. What are we doin’ here?”

  “This is where Abban lives. He had a cottage right there. I was inside it. It’s gone.”

  “Now who’s havin’ a dream?”

  He raised his hands in limp bewilderment. “This wasn’t a dream! I’ve run into him outside Glenna’s, and I’ve driven him home. Right here. The wily son of a bitch, he gave me the pillow and a lot of odd instructions that led to weird stuff, but . . . but we played draughts, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Weird stuff, you say?”

  “Things that blended with the dreams. I think he was planting suggestions in my head. There was the Mists of Ionarbadh and someone named Mad Darby ”

  Suddenly she burst out laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Oh, my dear Mr. Andersen, this really is too grand. I’ve never actually seen one myself.”

  “One what?”

  “A wily son of a bitch charading as a priest, you say? A little man? I do believe you’ve been consorting with one of our cluricauns.”

  A cluricaun. Related to a leprechaun but in a less respectable way, a reveler and a trickster. Lane bristled at the nonsense but quickly softened because she was so damned happy about it. “Little boy lost,” she called him. Her horror, her grief, her agitation, were all suspended for a few moments. And when she returned to a more sober frame of mind, she still seemed pleased with him. Why? There was more love for being wrong in the world than being right, he realized. Be right and you were crucified. Be wrong and Sosanna McCabe forgave you a lot of things.

  But just for the record, he wasn’t wrong. He had gotten lost trying to find Abban’s, that was all. Little boy lost literally. The water had thrown him. It wasn’t until he got back to his rental that a certain symmetry occurred to him between the pond and Abban’s location. Water missing, water found.

  But before that he drove Sosanna home, happy to leave things where they stood. He would find another moment to tell her he loved her and that he wanted to stretch a month into eternity. There was no pressure now. They had all the time in the world.

  52

  “We don’t have all the time in the world, Una!”

  “Don’t ask me to go down there.”

  “I’m your husband. Are you not bound to me by the law that binds the sidhe for as long as I have your cape?” He wanted to add “if nothing more” but feared the answer.

  She looked at him and her sea-green eyes were colder than he had ever seen them. But he had no choice. Whether it was the end of days or there would be yet another millennium depended on what happened at the bottom of that gaping pit and beneath the hideous cathedral roof exposed there. He understood now that the transept lay beneath the center of the pond and that the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu was the very top of the steeple. He had heard tales of the Devil’s churches, of hammerbeam roofs being exposed by earthquakes and lone spires rising out of stench-filled fens in moonlight, but he had never connected it with the Pillar he had seen every day of his life. All those grave pits he had dug, and right next to him the whole time was the ultimate grave pit of mankind . . .

  “Come, Una. You haven’t gone down inside it yet. It’s a cup we cannot pass. Listen and tell me what you hear.”

  It was his cup, but she followed him. Across the footbridge in the pall of an afternoon gone dead, down rank on rank of gray tablets like so many stone fingernails reaching out of the earth, to the very edge of an abyss whose true bottom below mired ruins could only be guessed. Then into the slope at the top. Sliding, slogging, picking their way over green shapes rapidly going black in the temporal air. And all the while the Pillar growing, looming, until what it was was clear enough a steeple, an Eiffel Tower whose four stanchions swept upward into Gothic arches caked with drying, crumbling mud that could suddenly collapse. Una reached the edge of the sloped tiles and would go no further.

  Brone continued on gingerly, skidding and running and skidding again until he reached a point below the saw-toothed tiles, which now ringed him against a kind of vomitory leading into the steeple. Ignoring the peril of ooze, moat and unstable sediments, he zigzagged from one stone to another to maneuver directly under an arch. The American had steeplejacked up the dragon-spine buttresses, but from below, the structure looked more like a castle donjon than what it was.

  “Una!” he called, and the resonance of his own voice on the brink of the cavity chilled him. “Come here. Even I can feel somethin’ h
ere. It’s . . . it’s like rubbin’ a cat’s fur the wrong way.”

  But she stood fast at the top of the slope. “I can feel it,” she said.

  “Can you hear it?”

  “You know I can.”

  “But is it closer?”

  “Yes.”

  Of course, with the pond gone, it would be, he thought. And neither of them knew exactly what the configuration would be. Insane marching, what did it mean? His child’s mind had listened to the horror tales of his father and of the elders of Darrig and had conjured up robotic things doomed to eternal marching a regimented variation on the eternal dance of the sidhe. The wax and wane might not mean that the denizens below had found a breach yet, might not mean, as a priest had once imparted at the end of a long night of drinking, that the point of exit from Hell had been uncovered. Father Dunne had been called to Rome in his youth, had been assigned specially to Connemara, had claimed (it was whispered) to have seen illuminated text in the Vatican library showing the Gate. Father Dunne had been buried right here in the churchyard two years after Brone’s own father. God forgive the loquacious priest his weakness for alcohol, but if the time of Revelation was indeed at hand, and the two hundred million demons were to be unleashed, Brone feared he might meet old Dunne himself in the vanguard.

  “Look, Una! . . . can you see? It’s a dome! Right beneath the Pillar.” Brone had moved inside the arches, his voice dogged with the faint buzz of a tight place. He flexed his knees, testing the place where he stood. “It’s part of the church, right where we feared there was an openin’.”

  “Come out of there,” Una called.

  “It’s safe, I tell you. There’s nothin’ open, nothin’ exposed. Solid rock. It’s solid rock. There is no gate. Why should they be comin’? Just because the water was removed? That must be it. They know it changed, that’s all.”

  “It’s not safe. They’re comin’.”

  “They’ve always been comin’,” he cried in desperation. “They’re always probin’ for a way out. It doesn’t mean ”

  A sheet of mud calved off from the impenetrable darkness above him, collecting in a protracted thud to his left, and in its wake a lighter fallout drummed over the dome. Brone cringed until the dirt finished raining on his head and shoulders. The dome was thin and hollow. Dismayed, he dropped to his knees and pressed his ear to the curve. When he rose up all denial was gone from his face.