PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  Wearily he came off the dome, out through the arch, back across the moat and up the overlapped tiles. Una was looking at the lip of the basin above them. He tried to follow her gaze but saw only what he had seen before and a remnant of the rowboat scattered like a piece of Noah’s ark on Mt. Ararat.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” Her eyes came to rest on him as on a wall.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Una.”

  “Like what?”

  “Is it such a terrible thing I’ve done to you? Did not Paracelsus declare that undines could earn a soul by marrying a mortal and bearing his child? And aren’t merrows undines?”

  “I’ve always had a soul. But you’re in danger of losin’ yours.”

  The agony leaped back to his rugged face, a wince that carved unfamiliar lines through the strong features that had been Brone McCabe. “What choice do I have?”

  “You can flee,” she said promptly.

  “If what’s comin’ comes, no one can flee.”

  “‘. . . a third of mankind,’” she quoted his haunting verse from Revelation, chapter nine. “That means two-thirds will live.”

  “And you want me to run away?”

  “You and Sosanna . . . and me.”

  53

  Lane discovered two things when he got back to Cooney M’Gill’s rental cottage. The first was the green silk scarf tucked into his pocket Sosanna’s colors that she had given him prior to his road bowling toss. The second was a bottle of good Irish whiskey sitting on the table.

  Abban, he thought about the whiskey and dared hope it was a farewell present. The old man had seemed contrite about things, but didn’t he always wheedle? And whose farewell? Not Lane Andersen’s. Not now. For just a moment he considered the improbability that Abban was saying good-by for himself because his cottage had been washed away. But the water hadn’t been that high up the trunks of the oaks, and even though the small cottage itself had been seated lower on the site, there would have been debris or something sticking up. No, the most likely explanation was still that with Sosanna in the car he had simply gotten lost. All that water . . . if he had gone down the road a little further surely he would have seen Abban’s gray-white retreat back among a second cluster of oaks.

  So he draped the green scarf around his neck and opened the bottle. A little toast to tomorrow, he thought, pouring two fingers. The heady aroma carried a whiff of Abban’s ginger, he imagined, or perhaps it was just that the scents of spice and alcohol were freely associated with the old conniver. At the first sip of the potent libation sleepiness hit him, dulling his suspicions before they could fully form. A second swallow sent him feeling his way to the bedroom and the Hibernian dream pillow that lay fluffed and ready for him there. It was barely evening, and Lane Andersen fell fast asleep.

  The dream this time was quite different. He did not awaken to a century and a place beyond his own. No mists, no roads, no alien landscapes. For a long while he simply sank in a black void. If it was a journey, it was a journey of divestment, because his senses were stripped one by one as he shrank into a scarcely finite point of consciousness. In the end, nothing existed but a dialogue in his mind. And even that was pared down to the disciplined congeries that ruled his life:

  Imagination: I see the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu . . . the stele at the top . . .

  REASON: The resident stele? The original?

  Imagination: . . . its seal is crumbling away . . . it has a seam . . .

  (Doubt): You hope there’s a seam. You’re guessing, kiddo.

  Imagination: . . . I see what I see . . . the original stele is coming off, like the others . . . water is pouring into the pond . . .

  REASON: So, when all of the steles are on, it makes the pond drain; when all of them are off, it makes it fill. Makes sense.

  (Doubt): It’s a leap.

  Imagination: . . . I see Sosanna extremely happy because you’ve restored the pond . . .

  (Doubt): I see Sosanna scratching your eyes out, if you mess with the Pillar and things get worse, kiddo.

  Imagination: . . . the water is coming from the grotto . . .

  REASON: The reservoir we found in the grotto must act like a bladder. It must be fed by the tides and something like capillary action. All those tubes and velocity changes have an effect on volume and pressure and gravity. Bernoulli doesn’t cover it.

  Judgment: The important thing is that when all the steles are removed the pond will fill.

  (Doubt): That’s just wishful thinking. I can’t believe you guys.

  REASON: Granted it’s just one possibility.

  (Doubt): One of many.

  REASON: Another configuration would be if the imported steles were on and the resident one was off.

  (Doubt): What about each import by itself or either one with the resident stele in place?

  REASON: Macloy must have passed through at least one of those combinations in order to end up with all three on. We may have passed through another when we took the two imports off. We have no evidence that it affected anything. There seem to be just two consequences the pond drained and the pond filled so there are probably just two combinations that work.

  Judgment: We will treat the three variables as if there are only two. The steles from Peru and Egypt act as one.

  REASON: That yields four possibilities. We’ve already seen the Pillar with all the steles on, as well as the imports off and the resident on. That leaves us with the choice of all the steles off, or the resident off with the imports on. And Imagination says it’s all three off that makes the pond fill.

  (Doubt): Swell. Imagination believes everything he sees or is told. Can’t you tell we’re being tricked?

  REASON: By who?

  (Doubt): By Abban for one. What do you know about this guy?

  Imagination: . . . I see a cluricaun . . .

  REASON: That’s Sosanna’s way of explaining something she hasn’t figured out.

  Imagination: . . . I see a darker figure . . . a priest who serves the Prince of Darkness . . .

  REASON: That’s Brone McCabe’s version. The man’s a caretaker in a cemetery. Naturally he believes in hell.

  (Doubt): Doesn’t matter what Abban is. You can’t trust the bastard. You can’t trust a dream which we’re in now, in case you haven’t noticed. And you can’t trust that pulling all three steles off the Pillar is going to make things hunky-dory.

  REASON: The only other possibility of the four is imports on and the resident off.

  (Doubt): I feel better with that. Everything is devious. Never trust the simple or the obvious.

  REASON: It really comes down to a guess between the two we haven’t tried. Still, there’s a beauty in symmetry, in simple things.

  (Doubt): You’re lousy at guessing.

  REASON: This is true. It’s the penalty for being a rational person. But I’m hell with logic.

  (Doubt): It’s logical to be illogical in this case.

  REASON: Run that by me again.

  (Doubt): Look at it this way, what would all the fuzz-brained, touchy-feely, emotive, anti-science, anti-logic, superstitious, religiously fanatic, emotional, intuitive types in your life choose?

  REASON: I see your point. They’d take the obvious. Ockham’s razor. The Law of Parsimony.

  (Doubt): Yeah, whatever. You’ve made your chops going against the grain, kiddo.

  REASON: True.

  (Doubt): I rest my case.

  Judgment: We go for imports on, resident off.

  54

  Lane sat bolt upright in bed, the fire of a revelation burning in his chest. Put the steles from Peru and Egypt back on, remove the one from Connemara.

  The dream seemed more a thing of his own device than imposed from the murky collective of Connemara’s submerged past. He had figured it out as far as it could go, got it down to good odds. One out of two. Then it was a little better than a guess to eliminate one. Because it would not be the most straightforward
choice. Why should whatever culture had spawned the fantastic global cult of the pylons be any less devious than the rest of mankind? And what did he have to lose if he chose wrong, anyway? Flann Macloy had triggered the worst consequence already, hadn’t he? “Cluricauns and dreams, my ass,” he said aloud into the darkness.

  Put the steles from Peru and Egypt back on, remove the one from Connemara.

  It was twenty minutes before midnight when he started back to Thiollaney Merriu.

  He had the stone keys with him because that’s what the steles were, no more than keys that triggered fantastic mechanisms in the earth. The Pillar was an axle or a drive shaft of some kind whose nether extremities moved gears. And the reason for filling and emptying the pond was obvious: to gain access to the hideous colossus below.

  It had to be a demonic temple. In the history of superstitious Man, evil was always something hidden, consigned to darkness, buried, disguised, sealed in a cave, sunk in a lake, made invisible, banished to the voids of the universe. And Cinnfhail had originally been its outpost, a perilous sanctuary for those who had hedged their bets between the power of God and the power of Satan.

  He was passing the dark fields where the tombstones of those unfortunates had once stretched right up to the current boundary of Thiollaney Merriu. The bodies were probably still interred in the unmarked graves, he thought. And how many of the unholy lay within the boundaries of the churchyard? Ironic that the devout villagers had erected an iron fence and buried their dead closer and closer to the pond. Had they known what the initiates of Cinnfhail obviously knew, they would have been horrified to entrust the souls of their loved ones to that abominable ground.

  Coming round the final curve his gaze fell outside the throw of the headlights, and suddenly he was jamming on the brakes. The tires slid to a halt, leaving steam drifting up from the high beams. He lowered the passenger window and craned across the car for a look at the pool of light that filled the basin, starkly illuminating the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu. Brone McCabe had run cable from a utility shed and placed searchlights all around the pylon.

  Good. Lane didn’t relish going down in that pit in the dark, then scaling the awesome spire and fumbling with the stone keys. But when he had slid and stumbled down into the basin, the view from inside the ring of lights was mostly glare. His body heat shimmered around him like an aura. He had wanted to do this alone. If he failed, at least he wouldn’t have Brone McCabe’s indictment or Sosanna’s disappointment. But the lights bore down on him like baleful witnesses, and of course McCabe had put them here to keep track of the Pillar from the house. Only why were some of them aimed into the basin where the Irishman couldn’t have seen unless he intended to come out here? What did McCabe expect to see on the bottom?

  Beams and shadows crisscrossed, betraying Lane’s footing on the sloping tiles. The vents into which Flann Macloy’s partial corpse had washed seemed to rush up to meet him as he ran the final stutter steps. He leaped sideways onto the level lip of the moat, and he had to stare hard at the blackness to be sure it was water and not empty space. A faint disquieting odor touched his nostrils. Where had he smelled that before? Hazed in gray and blue, the massive four-arched base that culminated in the three-sided Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu soared over him.

  From this point he could see one transept that ran under two of the arches, interrupted at its midpoint by a slight dome of rock. Nothing looked substantial. It was all broken into cubistic plains like a grainy painting, half shadow, half light. Holding the stone keys out for balance, he crossed the black moat on vague stepping-stones.

  It was so still, so solid on the other side, that he seemed to be sinking. The splintered glare, the rise of the basin, the bedrock emptiness beneath his feet all seemed to hammer him with gravity. And now he felt something pass through the soles of his shoes and raise the hairs on his legs like an electrical field. He lifted his feet in place to break the circuit, but all that happened was that his calf muscles were suddenly aching and heavy. When he moved forward again, it was with exaggerated briskness. He reached the mossy crenellated stanchion to his left and began to climb.

  As he neared the rim of the basin his scalp began to tingle with vertigo. The searchlights dripped globules of glare, leaving trails on his vision. Giddily he reached the base of the Pillar and hugged it, closing his eyes to let the nausea subside. The texture of the stone, so curiously like sharkskin, seemed to fasten onto him in some way. At the moment, that felt good. But the stability was short-lived. Unmistakably he began to pick up a faint pulse.

  The sweat that had popped onto his brow was beginning to dry as he lifted his head. Abban’s warning about marching was infecting his imagination as it had infected his dreams about the grotto. He was disoriented, sick with fatigue, drugged with doctored whiskey, struggling in the chill night air above a place that was teeming with evaporated microbial life. But the damn pulse kept rising through the stone until he stopped feeling like Jack and the Beanstalk and started feeling like he was the straw-legged scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz listening to the wicked witch’s monkey soldiers marching, marching

  Halt! . . . more courage, more brains, more heart.

  So now he did his simian thing, crooking his arms around the Pillar and letting his legs muscles do the work. And he got to the top, and the stone keys went in easily this time, because the encrustations were already scraped out of the grooves. First the one from Peru, then the one from Egypt. But before he could start working on removing the resident stele, he heard the footsteps again, only this time they weren’t marching. They had broken into a run, and it was the dead hour midnight and they were coming at him from the darkness of the graves.

  55

  You and Sosanna . . . and me, she had said. The three of them could run away together, she had said. Brone milked the words for the commitment from his wife he had never felt before. But, of course, they couldn’t run away. Not together. Not he and Una and Sosi. The best he could do was to send them away. He could set Una free (give her the red cape at last) and hope for the best. Perhaps it would be safe in the ocean. Safe for Una anyway, even if Sosi couldn’t follow. How much longer did they have?

  He listened for the hundredth time since Mr. Billy’s death to the silence downstairs, as if his loyal companion would find a way to come back and warn him of intruders in the churchyard. And then, as he had every quarter of an hour or so since turning on the floodlights he had brought in for the pond, he went to the window. But this time his startled eyes saw a presence they didn’t want to see: the damned Yank again! Lane Andersen was climbing the Pillar.

  Brone’s unintelligible roar drove both women from their beds before he reached the stairs. Una was fully dressed, aware that they were spending their final hours together in this house. Sosanna was in a nightdress, awake but brooding over things she had heard and seen throughout the evening. It wasn’t so much her father’s dire mutterings about what lay beneath the churchyard, or even his apocalyptic prayers (she had heard those before), it was her mother’s utterly hollow look. Did that look mean she believed his mutterings about the Gate of Hell being underneath the basin?

  If it was true, it had always been true, and yet they had lived their lives like normal people. Lane Andersen, on the other hand, insisted that it was just an archaeological ruin, that the ingenious mechanical device for drawing down the water was man-made. As grim and alarming as the events of the last twenty-four hours had been, she wanted to believe that.

  Brone jammed cartridges into his 12-gauge shotgun, spilling the rest of the box on the mantel. Then he made for the door, brushing Una aside. It was his refusal to answer questions that drew the women after him through the doorway and from there on a dead run in his wake. Despite his age and the fact that he carried a cumbersome weapon, he stayed ahead of his wife and daughter all the way to the pond, and it wasn’t until he stopped and raised the 12-gauge that either woman got a glimpse of who it was on the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu.

  When
the shotgun blast came, everything seemed to freeze while the report coiled away.

  Lane Andersen never registered the pattern of perturbations that passed through the air barely above his head. He was still squinting against the glare, unable to distinguish the collective steps from the more regimented vibrations in the earth and convinced he was about to see a mob. But when he heard Sosanna’s protesting cry buried in the roar, he understood.

  “It’s me, McCabe!” he shouted.

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  Like some sort of perambulating Greek sculpture The LaocoÖn Sosanna yanked back on her father’s arm while Una tried to restrain her. The struggle lasted all the way to the edge of the basin. And then, because Lane hesitated, Brone paused too.

  “I’ve figured it out,” Lane called and his words were dogged by the faint cadence that continued to rise from the earth below their feet. “I think I know the code that will fill the pond.”

  “You think? I think you’d better quit thinking. Come down or I’ll bring you down like a quail ” He maneuvered to keep Sosanna at bay.

  “Lane!” she called, and in her voice was a plaintive note that said it all.

  “I’m telling you, I can fill the pond.”

  “Are you deaf?” Brone answered. “Can’t you hear the marchin’?”

  “I don’t believe in Satan’s shock troops, McCabe. Seismologists figured out rumblings in the earth a long time ago. It’s water surging somehow the grotto is a honeycomb or maybe it’s coming from the mechanism that drained the pond.”

  “Your daft. It’s them. The dead. The demons. And it’s too late to do anythin’ about it.”

  “If it’s too late, then I can’t hurt anything by filling the pond.” He got a moment’s pause from that and seized upon it. “I’ve put the other stone keys back in. If I pull out the original one, that may do it. It’s either that or all three have to come out.”