PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  But “clear” meant he was merely in the maelstrom now, because the water level heaved and troughed as it rose. He grasped the dynamics, that the lower regions would fill to the rims of the four tunnels and then flow in. Wherever the original pond had gone, perhaps coursing through dry aquifers inland, this was fresh seawater and it might not stop at all. He had no idea what it meant overhead, or whether Sosanna was safe, but the Gate of Thiollaney Merriu had opened above some portion of the pond, and so the basin below where the water was streaming in must have filled. Steadily he worked his way in the direction of the nearest tunnel as the inundation lifted him to meet it.

  And all the while the violet haze was deepening, the odor intensifying, both clearly emanating from the cardinal tunnels. The violet especially was pronounced in the dark maw just ahead, like the heart of some enticing orchid. He was nearly to the lip of that gaping boring, and violet had always mesmerized him, drawn him.

  Surge topped the edge of the tunnel and rippled along the floor. That was going to be the high water mark. Because it would flow endlessly into unknown interiors and never be banked, never be dammed. Damned. The water giggled at his word play, and it occurred to him that he was losing it his sanity because his mind had been jolted from bedrock logic and his fate was sealed and the shock was beginning to insulate him. Violet. He would rest in the bower of violet. Except that now the shallow draft had reached the limits of what he could see far into the tunnel, and there were flashes of things in rows that were bogging down in the current.

  Electrified, he began to back tread. It was the motion of what he was staring at that was so troubling. Ordinal rows. Like a parade. Like marchers. Only marchers shouldn’t look like that. Bodies should have even numbers of limbs. Heads should be firmly attached and all eye sockets should be filled. Rib cages should never show through cerements no matter how ragged. Worst of all was the terrible drivenness of their progress. A spectral urgency accompanied their thrashing against the millrace current. And as they floundered and fell and heaped upon each other like a weir made of bones, Lane Andersen caught just the barest glimpse of other forms, black and winged and monstrous, behind them.

  He wanted no more. Would not enter the tunnel. If he had to die, he could at least pick the place. He would cling anywhere to anything, even lodge or impale himself on the stellate projections that flanked the oval.

  So now he struck out against the flow, head down, stroke turning over in a full sprint, a six-beat kick foaming up behind him. He was trying to make progress back toward the torrents that were still descending through the open Gate. But after a few yards he slowed and began to be carried sideways. Foot by foot he slipped into a vortex that whirled him counterclockwise around the deluge. At last, exhausted and swimming blindly, he collided with curved stone.

  He had been swept into a small domed vault set into one wall of the cathedral. The side structure topped out no more than halfway up to the highest point in the nightmare cathedral, and thus the water pressed him into the dome itself. A good way to drown, he thought. And it would have been, but the water continued to flow down the tunnels, maintaining the level just below the top of the dome. Nor could he escape, because the current was trapping him in its outward half. Twice he groped around the smooth stone surface, and twice the water drove him back when he tried to pass the midpoint.

  So this was it. He would tread water as long as he could, and then he would drown. He had removed the stone keys that had come with him from halfway around the world and flooded the site, but he had failed to restore the original stele and close the Gate. Was he merely an inevitable part of an unknown apocalypse, or had he committed an inadvertent blasphemy for which there was no redemption? The face of destiny was still inscrutable, but he was sure now that it was anything but the terms of an insignificant life on a small and transient world. He could know nothing except that he had been created, and thus was not his own master. If you believed in Satan, could you believe in God? his mother had asked him in a dream. He still didn’t know. Didn’t think it mattered. Whatever was his master, he had chosen too late.

  Each time he was driven back to the nadir of the curving waterline he felt debris against him. One piece in particular seemed large enough and buoyant enough to offer support. So now he reached out for it, grasping what was at hand. No time to be coy, his fingers intertwined with weediness until his thumb slid across a bare spot and encountered a thin line of bristle. And then he was gagging and surging away from it, because he knew what an eyebrow felt like, and of course there would only be one corpse fresh enough to have hair like that Beethoven hair one corpse (half a corpse to be precise) that still had a shirt on its back. Flann Macloy must have been thrust into the same backwater by the turbulence, but when you were in the vestibule of Hell you couldn’t exclude the possibility of a malevolent will behind it, and Lane didn’t think twice about grabbing a final breath and diving down, down, down with no intention of ever coming up again.

  The funny thing was that he actually found serenity deep down under, because the current that had blocked him from leaving the dome slackened there and let him swim out under the canopy of cascading water, which really didn’t amount to much as long as he stayed on the bottom. And he fully intended to stay on the bottom.

  He would have, too, but the hands followed him. Followed him and found him. Flann Macloy wanted revenge. So he struggled. No road bowling to settle accounts this time. Mano a mano. Except that as he grew feebler and feebler, the other hands got gentler and gentler, pulling him up, pulling him somewhere, until he knew it was his mother come for him as she had that day in the cliff. You never forget hands that save you like that. And she was saving him. Again.

  59

  Brone ran, his heavy legs blurring through searchlight after searchlight. He had not seen Sosanna start down into the basin, or Una follow, and now he peered in vain through light and shadow to pick out their silhouettes on the rim. The arched gantry kept him from seeing his daughter below until he reached the spot from where they had departed, and then his heart jumped, because he knew instantly that Una had gone into the water. A thousand times in twenty-eight years he had imagined such a scene, and he knew every conceivable variation. Sometimes it was a pair of shoes sitting primly by the water’s edge. Other times it was clothes cast about, or Sosanna looking stricken at ripples as she was now, or concentric rings melting away, or it could be just an ominous silence over water that was too placid. But never had he imagined it while he held her red cape in his hand.

  What did it mean? Had she gone after Lane Andersen? She could not survive beyond mortal limits without the cape. Sliding and stumbling he came down the basin, and before he was halfway to the bottom he saw her rise effortlessly through the turbulence to the surface, his Una, towing the Yank behind her. By the time he reached them the two women were dragging sputtering Andersen over the stones. He himself was wheezing with the effort of coming down the uneven slope, but Una was no more out of breath than if she had gone for a stroll on the beach.

  Her eyes came up to meet his, and she saw the red cape that he held in his hand. For an instant the sea green depths of her stare opened to him one instant only and seemed to offer something too profound for words. When had she ever needed words?

  Not so for him. He wished he could whisper his soul to her at that insane moment, declaring what he had never adequately said, but all he could do to show her that he understood was to drop the red cape at the water’s edge.

  Then the tumult of unfolding catastrophe reclaimed the stage, and he came forward to push the women away and deliver three sound whacks on the back of the coughing Yank.

  “He’ll make it!” he shouted to his daughter above the cataract, but Sosanna’s eyes were going from the red cape to her mother.

  Lane labored with racking inhalations as he tried to sit up and speak.

  “Too late, Yank,” Brone said. “It’s prayer or nothin’ now.”

  But the young man was trying to point,
even as Brone pounded his back again. His gesture fell out of line each time he collapsed in a fit of coughing. Only Sosanna saw what it was he was trying to indicate that they hadn’t noticed before. The stele. The original stele that had sat at the top of the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu for untold ages was sticking out of the mud of the arch where it had been thrown from Lane’s grasp by the collapse of the Pillar onto the Gate. She had heard him describe the two possibilities for restoring the pond and the Pillar before he had guessed wrong, and now he was seeing the stele that could rectify the error.

  “But it’s not too late for you, Una,” Brone said sternly. “Go to the cliff, dive into the sea and get as far away as you can!”

  Una’s lips formed an “o” that could only have been the end of a refusal.

  “Don’t be foolish! There’s still time. You know what’s comin’.”

  She shook her head.

  “Two of three will survive. Let yourself be one!”

  Through the mist and roar of the cataract they seemed to see and hear each other for the first time. She would not go. Nearly three decades earlier she had come back to him because she was carrying his child, but now the child was long grown. Brone McCabe dared believe that if her reason for staying was still to be a mother, there was a part of her that wanted to remain his wife as well.

  Choking, gasping, his eyes wide, Lane suddenly came to his hands and knees, and this time Brone and Una followed the direction of his alarm. But they were already too late to see the stele. Too late to see their daughter again, as well. Because Sosanna’s nightdress lay on the damp stone . . . and the red cape and the stele were gone.

  It was only a few more seconds before a new undampened resonance began. The sepulchral rumble ended in a lurch that knocked Lane flat and rocked Brone to his knees. Una caught herself on one hand. She did not fully comprehend what was happening, but she divined the metamorphosis her daughter had chosen. Sosanna was gone, the cape was gone, and the Gate was closing. In another moment they would be separated perhaps forever. Lunging forward in a desperate dive, Una McCabe disappeared cleanly into the rush of water.

  In her brief wake the thunder of the deluge was halved, just as the figures this side of the Gate had been halved. The underrealm and the earth were sealed off from each other once again.

  Neither man saw the Pillar actually rise through the arched base on its translucent axis. By then they were struggling to escape the deepening swell that raced around the perimeter of the basin. Eventually it tossed them back exhausted and half-drowned to their world. Dawn found them still sitting there on the old bank, stupefied, waiting to see in the pure light of day that it was just as before: the pond mute and still; the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu standing above its black surface, a single stone tablet mounted near the top of one of its three faces.

  At last Brone gathered his voice. “They’ll be back, you know,” he declared wearily. “They always come back merrows do.” And he stood and slapped his trouser legs, as if they were dusty instead of damp, and ambled back toward the house. “They’ll be back . . .”

  60

  He didn’t know when or if he would ever go back to America, but the book Lane Andersen wrote while living in western Ireland became a retrospective of the 70’s and early 80’s in northern California, largely made up. He had become his own myth-maker. Certainly he couldn’t write the truth about the sites at Sacsayhuaman, Giza and Connemara without inviting exploration. There were times when he doubted it had ever happened, but doubt was an old defeated enemy now, and its feeble resurgences were more like hope, like wishful thinking, than rejections of glimpses beyond the pale. It had happened. All of it. Man was not meant to reside in smug security on an all-knowing Earth.

  There was a certain redemption in accepting that you had to be humble, that you had to tremble before the unknowable. It kept you honest. Lane walked the beaches and pondered tides and avoided Doreen Brynn. Once, he attended a mass at the new church up on the hill the other side of Darrig but found it unsatisfying. It wasn’t, he thought, that the power of the cosmos wasn’t manifested there; it was that the whole horrendous hypocrisy of Man still was.

  And he saw Brone McCabe from time to time. On the first occasion, standing on the rise just south of the grotto in a seaward breeze, they spoke to each other; and after that they simply nodded at a distance.

  “They’ll be back,” Brone repeated the day they spoke, as if they were

  single-minded sentries passing each other on a common watch that had not changed since he had last uttered those words. And in a sense they were sentries.

  “How do you know they’ll be back?” Lane demanded. “The Gate closed. They were trapped.”

  “You think Una didn’t want our Sosi to belong to the sea? All those years I thought she was lookin’ for the cape for herself. But somewhere along the line, she didn’t need it anymore. She wanted it for our daughter, because she knew what she would become. What mortal knows the stages of the sidhe? And what sidhe can be trapped in the earth? So they’re both in the sea now. When you see Sosi again, you must seize the cape.”

  Lane didn’t challenge it. He knew now that it was Una who had saved him the day in the cliff, and again from the deluge in the cathedral. But seize the cape? He didn’t think he would have to. It was possible to belong to two worlds, to return to the border at will. And every night he laid his head on the Dream Pillow and set off to search the shore . . .

  About the Author

  From his first introduction by the Chicago Tribune as “ . . . a John Barth or a John Irving, with a touch of William Gaddis and maybe a dash of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” Thomas Sullivan has been eclectic. Self-described as “well-ranged if not deranged,” Sullivan has over ninety publishing credits across the spectrum of fiction categories. His short stories and novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Literary praise has been generous and ongoing for his principal works, including the novels BORN BURNING (optioned for a major Hollywood film), THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON (a Pulitzer Prize nominee), THE MARTYRING (a World Fantasy Best Novel finalist), the critically praised DUST OF EDEN and SECOND SOUL. Author Loren D. Estleman calls Sullivan “a national treasure,” and journalist/novelist Lowell Cauffiel says: “Trying to pigeonhole Thomas Sullivan would be like calling Hemingway an outdoor writer or Fitzgerald the king of glamour or glitz. He’s that good, moving effortlessly from one literary landscape to another, his cast of wonderful characters in tow.”

  Among Sullivan’s awards, honors and prizes are a pair of D.A.D.A. literary cash prizes (“Investitures,” 1985, and “The Muse,” 1987), another cash prize from the Hemingway Days Festival in Key West (“To Walk the Earth,” 1985), and a Catholic Press Association short story award (“The 4th Flight Is Forever,” 1996). Nominations that further demonstrate the author’s diversity include the Governor’s Arts Award (Michigan, 1994), Nebula Award (“The Fence,” 1987), Pushcart Award (pre-publication, THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON, 1985), and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON in 1989. His short story “The Man Who Drowned Puppies” was listed among the top-10 horror stories of all time by a Writer’s Digest editor, and his novel, THE MARTYRING, was a choice for Thrillers Book of the Month. The latter was also a finalist for the 1999 Best Novel World Fantasy Award. DUST OF EDEN was a Borders national selection. His last novels, SECOND SOUL and THE WATER WOLF, were released to critical acclaim, and a forthcoming new novel CASE WHITE is receiving early buzz.

  Not surprisingly, his personal history is also broadly based. A former All-American athlete in two sports, he has lived in a dozen countries and been a gambler, a “Rube Goldberg” innovator, a coach, a teacher, a city commissioner and has raised a family. Currently he writes full-time and is a frequent international speaker across venues as diverse as the House of Literature in Oslo, Norway, and American schools and universities. His inspirational monthly newsletter (Sullygram) is available free on request.

  http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

/>   More Books by Thomas:

  DIAPASON (Condor, 1978)

  THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON, E. P. Dutton, 08/88, hardcover mainstream.

  BORN BURNING, E. P. Dutton, 8/89, hardcover.

  THE MARTYRING, Forge, 03/98, hardcover.

  DUST OF EDEN, NAL (Onyx), May 4, 2004.

  SECOND SOUL, NAL (Onyx), August 5, 2005.

  Coming Soon:

  CASE WHITE, Crossroad Press, 2014

  Cleopatra’s Needle

  by

  Carole Lanham

  1

  If the wind blows just right on Six Bells Hill, the dove tree petals scatter end over end like white handkerchiefs torn from unsuspecting fingers. The wind was blowing that final day when Unc Mael took up a pair of dog-rose circlets and placed one each atop our heads. It was snowing hankies and Iago’s black hair whipped with white. Unc laid a heavy hand on me and crushed thorns into my scalp. He crushed thorns into Iago, too.

  “If I had but one wish in this old world,” he said. “I’d wish Dyfan Awbrey’s daughter married one day to my son.”

  These were funny words, I thought, seeing how he was taking his son and leaving for America come morning. But Iago and I smiled at one another in our flower crowns. We were all of ten years old that day, and I clung to Iago Godwyn’s hand, willing the years to fly like petals.