PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “You’ll make things worse.”

  “How?”

  Una spoke. “The marchers are very near . . .” she said to Brone. “Perhaps the pond would be a barrier.”

  “The pond?” he repeated incredulously. “If the Gate opens, you think the pond will make a difference?”

  Lane, who could make out nothing of the conversation but the words “the pond,” called out: “It can’t hurt.”

  Brone’s face twisted with an agony that was exaggerated by shadows in the backglow of the floods. A fine Watcher he had been to end like this, a helpless witness to a doom that might have been forestalled to another age. When at last he nodded, a spasm shook his shoulders, but of course that went unnoticed by the figure still poised to pry out a piece of stone that promised to be a lynchpin. It was the standing down of the shotgun that Lane could see unambiguously. McCabe planted the butt end onto the ground. With cautious glances back to the basin’s edge, he began to pry out the resident stele of Thiollaney Merriu.

  56

  He could taste triumph, that delicious moment when insolubles suddenly make perfect sense. In the glare of five searchlights, and literally up a pole in the bizarre setting of an ancient ruin, a drained pond, and a no-vacancy churchyard on the west coast of Ireland, Lane had the odd premonition that he was the right man in the right place at the right time.

  But then, premonitions were never his strong suit.

  As the seams crumbled exactly the way they had in his dream and the stele popped out in his hand with a slight magnetic tug, the obelisk base tower trembled and the remaining mud calved away from its arches. An instant later the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu began to drop like a ponderous piledriver.

  It was too massive to throw him off. He actually seemed to catch up to it in the first few feet, his arms tightening around its girth. And when the pinnacle passed through the top of the base he heard something snap into place with magnetic precision. From that point on a thin translucent core trailed behind the Pillar like a filament from a spider. The rest of the descent was a blur. The concussion when it hit the slight dome at the bottom shook him loose.

  He struck on his left shoulder and the shock dissipated across his torso, rattling his teeth. For a few seconds he lay there assessing whether he had broken any bones, but the pain that remained was somehow lessened by the deafening rumble beneath the base tower. He rolled next to a stone ledge that seemed to be moving upward. Machinery was engaged: levers, counterweights, cogs, cams, gears grinding within gears, helical threads screeching.

  Daemon ex machina.

  Because now he smelled the mephitic taint he had smelled in the subcavern at Giza and in the swale hole by Cinnfhail. Only it was no longer a mere fetid blend of saturation and dryness. He had once been in a sugar beet factory where the cloyingly sweet odors sickened him. This was worse. Something was rotting in bile, something as dry as burnt brick, as chimney soot, yet as putrid as bubbling flesh caked with fungus. It came on a searing wind that sucked the air from his lungs and left no doubt whatever that he had entered something that did not belong to the earth, something that for all its intensity had no kinship with life.

  And then came the violet haze, banding up around him. It illuminated everything and revealed nothing, and he knew now that the surrounding stone ledge wasn’t really moving upward at all. He was moving down. The stone plinth upon which both he and the Pillar rested was lowering into a yawning interior. And he didn’t need the metered echoes hammering him from all sides to know that legions were marching under the earth.

  There was no name to put to it. It was enough that he had been hideously wrong. Because where he was and what he was sensing through every pore was the true natural order. It was reason that was the outpost. Reason was what he had fled to from a desolate childhood where Hell was psychedelic music marching out an insane cadence and black lights gave everything a violet haze. Welcome, home.

  Like a slowly prowling cloud the soft glow began to discriminate between jet blacks and inky blacks. He could make out limits now, or rather he could make out the four huge oval tunnels above him that led off in what must be the four cardinal directions. The searing breeze that carried the stench seemed to come from all of them. Above the plinth upon which both he and the Pillar rested he began to distinguish the intrados of a vault soaring into the irregular underside of multiple cathedral roofs. There were insidious galleries with winged silhouettes he dared not study lest they move, and oddities of mismatched elements to correspond with the exterior vigas and spandrels and interior friezes whose themes thankfully remained obscure. He understood it was a mockery of religion, that this cathedral lacked even the ambivalence of Cinnfhail. And below, the architectural promise was totally dashed in a charnel pit of moldering residues that bore disturbing resemblances to the human beings they no longer were.

  There in the barely decipherable gloom of this place truths were becoming crystal clear to him: his own vanity and arrogance, the limits of rationality. Doubt is a failure of the imagination. That was his sin. To never have imagined the truth among all his clever imaginings. There were things that didn’t fit this world, things reserved for the next, and he was at the border, and he knew it was summoned prematurely, that he had triggered it and that his soul perhaps lay in the balance of what happened next. He had guessed wrong! All three steles removed would have filled the pond. And then only then if he could have replaced the resident stele as it was when he had arrived at Thiollaney Merriu, the Gate might close, might return as it had been. The translucent core that had telescoped out behind the falling Pillar suggested as much that the Gate could be closed again. It probably anchored at the top of the base, and with the resident stele in place the Pillar would rise up that shaft to its former position above the pond.

  But he didn’t have the resident stele.

  It had been jarred from his grasp when the Pillar struck the basin. Wiping his eyes, he blinked away purple blotches in an effort to search the stone plinth. He stood upright, pausing to suppress a gag reflex as his stomach settled. The stench that had sickened him in Egypt flowed from the four huge ovals toward the Pillar in the center, and it must be columning straight up. It meant he was at the very hub of wherever those tunnels led. It meant that the Gate was open and drawing malignant vapors onto the earth.

  Sosanna and her family were up there. They must be smelling this and hearing the dull thud and shuffle that was so unnerving. He thought he saw hints of illumination from Brone’s searchlights, but it was too far to be sure, too far to climb out. The violet suffusion filled the thin core spindle that had telescoped out of the Pillar and upon which it must rise back up. He could see twenty-five or thirty feet of that core above the Pillar, and he guessed it stopped at the bottom of the basin from which the Gate had opened, because the visible rod seemed to absorb the purple spectrum in the intervening chasm. The glimpse he had gotten during his fall had shown it translucent, like the quartz or amber that had encased the jackal head in the subcavern of Giza.

  Again he circled the plinth where he stood, searching for the fallen stele. The base of the Pillar resembled a giant pestle, and that put the idea in his brain that the thin slate he was looking for might be pinned underneath. If it was, it was ground to bits. He felt for fragments along the curve at the bottom, found none. But as he circled he saw that both stone keys were still in place at the top of the spire, and a desperate resolve entered his mind: If I pull them off, I can still flood the pond.

  57

  Brone was too numb for anger and too shocked to focus on anything but what had been loosed. His world had collapsed with the fall of the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu. Everyone’s world had collapsed.

  They had all seen and heard the same things, the roar of stone imbalances, the groan of unknown machinery, the gleam of a thin axis that caught the searchlights and followed the Pillar down between the arches of that curious gantry. Immediately afterward they had been repulsed by the smell, the retting smell made expon
entially fouler and carried seemingly on the dreary shuffle of armies that shook the churchyard. And then they had each acted reflexively, as if preoccupied with their deepest need in those precious remaining minutes: Sosanna rushing precipitously down the slope of the basin, her face white with fear, her eyes scarcely leaving the spot where Lane Andersen had disappeared; Una calling a warning to her daughter and, when it was ignored, following at a slightly slower pace; Brone hurrying around the rim of the basin, bent on a mission he hoped would at least give Una a chance to survive what was coming.

  As he passed the utility shed where he kept tools, Brone stopped long enough to exchange the shotgun for a shovel. With the shovel he went straight to the unused plots at the lower edge of the grotto. Here he began to dig in the scattered rays beside one of the searchlights. This was the spot where he had felt the shudder the night he had left his offering to the Water Wolf. He had known then that it was a premonition of his own future gravesite. But he wasn’t preparing his own grave now. He was retrieving something he had recently buried here. Something he had relocated many times.

  When the new sound from the basin reached him he froze over the shovel. He had once heard a colony of bats emerging from a cave on the Burren at twilight, and that was how he imagined it would start. Only it would be infinitely louder, of course. And now he heard the whirring of obscene wings dredging up entities that sickened his imagination. Two hundred million demons coming through the Gate. Deafening except . . .

  It wasn’t whirring. It was water. The wonderful music of water! With a surge of hope he dared exhale the steamy breath he had been holding. Thiollaney Merriu was flooding again.

  He never looked up to see where the burst was coming from, but his shovel flew. His eyes were stark and, though he could not hear his own voice, he was bellowing with fear and hope. It seemed to take forever before he struck the object he had hidden there, a plastic kitchen storage container. Peeling back its flexible lid while it was still half mired, he reached in and withdrew the sleek red cape that lay carefully folded inside.

  ***

  Una pulled her daughter’s arm and shouted her name.

  The water was sluicing up through the same vents through which Flann Macloy’s severed corpse had vanished, and the speed alone threatened to sweep Sosanna off her feet as she struggled toward the arch where she had last seen Lane Andersen.

  “He’s gone . . . you can’t bring him back from there,” Una said in her ear.

  Sosanna’s white face remained intent on the whirlpool between the arches. “He made the water come back! He’s alive!”

  “Even if he did, he’s drowned.”

  “The water’s slowin’. Air might be trapped under the roof.”

  What she said about the water was true. The inundation that had begun with spume and froth kicking high in the air had settled into a maelstrom that, for all its raging, wasn’t climbing at all. They could not know the configuration below ground, that the four tunnels that began well above the plinth where Lane had scaled the Pillar to remove the stone keys would not permit the level to rise. But Sosanna had saved him once before in this very pond, and she was not afraid to try again. She took another step, her nightdress ballooning up around her hips.

  Una grabbed her fiercely, smothering her struggles. The arms about her had an almost supernatural strength. Unable to break free, Sosanna turned her head at last to plead and was shocked by what she saw. Never had she seen her mother so intent, so incandescent. Her skin was translucent and faintly tinged green in the overlay of lights. And her voice had a power that distracted Sosanna from the words. “Do you love him?” the insistence voice kept asking, but it wasn’t until Sosanna was wrestled exhausted onto the stones that she answered brokenly, “Yes . . . yes!”

  Distracted by her own admission, she scarcely registered her mother’s fluid movements until Una McCabe had slipped out of her clothes and into the water as easily as returning home.

  58

  While Brone McCabe was still digging for the red cape, Lane Andersen doubted for the last time. Was it all in a bottle of Irish whiskey? Had he really awakened since the last dream? He had thought he had awakened on the other occasions awakened to paintings grating on the wall and to the Mists of Ionarbadh the night he had visited Cinnfhail and later saw the black coach of death hurtling straight up the cliff at him but he had not. Why should this be any different?

  The trouble was it added up. Each fragment had fed his knowledge, had brought him to this point of profound reality that seemed as simple as good and evil. He hated the apocalyptic tone of it, so like his mother’s view of the universe. The unspeakable potency of chaos was all around him. And he knew it had changed him. The perfectly contained island called Lane Andersen had become a peninsula, and if he valued that tentative connection with the mainland, he knew what he must do.

  Reeking with approaching pestilence and swirling with violet haze, the demon church seemed to mount its own assault on him as he circled the plinth at its center. He blinked away the corrosive atmosphere. The two remaining stone keys were above him. He grasped the Pillar. But as he lifted his right foot to climb, he sensed something behind him so intense that he felt compelled to pause and look back over his shoulder. Surreal twilight stretched out over the interior pit of nave and transepts, and the four huge black ovals hung above the level of the plinth at the four cardinal points just as before. The rhythm of the march was the same, sighing like the armatures on a slowly moving steam locomotive. He scrutinized the moldering piles of horror below but could detect no movement, no change. It must have been a sudden gust coming through the tunnels that had raised the hairs on his neck. This he decided without much conviction.

  His left hand was hooked around the Pillar again when the green flash skittered off the fantastic galleries that flanked him. Simultaneously the air beat with a sound so low and resonant that fine particles began to rain down. When he turned around this time it was slowly, bowels already awash, calves trembling.

  And he didn’t have to search for the cause, because the tunnel mouth directly across the gulf was radiant with unearthly green, and the creature he had maligned as myth was braced in titanic proportions on its edge. No introductions needed. The Water Wolf’s black fur rippled with convection and its rigid yellow eyes seethed with lethal

  single-mindedness.

  He had read his Hesiod, his Apollodorus Lane Andersen had. Quaint myths, of course. The twelfth labor of Hercules had been to defeat the mindless brute that guarded the Gates of Hell: Cerberus, the three-headed dog. Quaint myth. Except that myths were based on something. Not surprising then that it should be a little garbled, that someone’s history had consolidated it into a tale its regional culture could grasp.

  Sacsayhuaman.

  Giza.

  Thiollaney Merriu.

  Three Gates of Hell. Three mindless brutes to guard them, all similar, all indigenous to their territories. Puma, jackal, wolf. Three aspects of the same gatekeeper. And here was one of them, a creature of metaphysical dimensions, shocking Lane Andersen into truth:

  This is the beast that killed my father.

  The majesty of the predator’s leap broke the spell. It leaned and lunged straight at the mortal as if a hundred yards or more did not separate them. For an impossibly long moment it maintained its trajectory, a thing of ballistic beauty, as if the laminar flow of energy around it were a vehicle. But then it faltered and fell, landing well out in the corrupt mockery of a cathedral. It landed but it didn’t lose its focus. Instantly it streaked toward the raised plinth.

  Lane saw its eyes flashing through a maze of vertical planes that were more like pens than pews, and the passion of the thing and the speed of its assault galvanized him at last. His fate was sealed, but not the fate of those above. If he couldn’t close the Gate, at least he could try to flood the pond again. That might slow down whatever was coming. Whatever it was they were. He didn’t want to think about that. His allegiance was to the living, and th
e living stood directly overhead. Planting one foot up the Pillar he lunged for a handhold opposite the two remaining stone keys.

  In a single motion he yanked the Peruvian stele off, just as his father must have done from another pillar in another pond the day he was born. The guardian then would have been a puma Supay the Inca god of death and the underworld. That was what had robbed him of a childhood. Not paternal abandonment. The claw marks on his body went from the back of his skull to his heels. So be it. Like father, like son.

  Rage built with the rush coming toward him, competing with the swell of the marching. He had the second stele off just as he heard the throaty roar. And then the two sounds seemed to merge into one, but now it was neither feral beast nor the insidious shuffle of an obscene army. It was a third sound. Water roaring, rushing, swelling. It cascaded through the open Gate as Lane swung limply around the Pillar to face his destiny and his doom.

  The Water Wolf could have completed its kill before the mortal drew another breath. There was no doubt about that. Slavering fangs bared, molten eyes fixed on the target, it was a single bound away when it suddenly stiffened and held. And now it glowered upward from the floating offal piles in the pit of the demon cathedral. Dumb brute that it was, it had chosen to desist. Why? Lane Andersen, a creature of reason (and something more than reason now), tried to understand.

  He had brought the water back, the barrier that helped guard the Gate. And guarding the Gate was the single object of the Water Wolf. Therefore, he Lane Andersen had become an ally. It wasn’t to keep the living out that was necessary; it was to keep the dead in. He knew now why Flann Macloy, who had drained the pond, was among the latter.

  The last he saw of the Water Wolf was the green shimmer of its energy as its native element rose around it. And then the torrents were lifting him off the plinth away from the Pillar. Water flumed over him, driving him under, pinning him. It was salt water, and he could not open his eyes. He resisted fighting the cascade, simply letting it take him to its lowest level like a gang tackle. And there, among the trembling piles of offal, he pushed away horrors beyond what sanity permitted him to recognize. Tucking into a ball, he pulled off his shoes. Then he took three hard horizontal kicks and full pulls. And this time when he turned upward he burst into the thinner perimeter of the downpour and stroked his way clear.