The Pandora Room: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  I’d just give it to them.

  The thought shocked him. The moment it entered his mind, he fought against it. For its historical value alone, the jar could not be allowed to fall into the hands of those who would destroy or bury it. But if one believed it held wonders, or horrors that might put people in danger, handing it over to the New Caliphate would be the most grievous of sins.

  If one believed.

  Martin’s gut still roiled with a remnant of the nausea he’d felt topside. He vomited in front of Walker and Kim, but at least Sophie hadn’t been there to see it. She wasn’t just the boss, she was just about the most impressive person Martin had ever met, and he had gotten used to his infatuation being the source of amusement for some members of the Beneath Project. Sophie had flirted with him from time to time over the past year, but he’d never sensed any real intent or interest in her until today.

  But that had been before. Any hope that might have been sparked by her comments had now been extinguished. Catastrophe had intervened. Murder and fear had killed that flicker of hope that she might see him as something more than a student with a crush on his teacher.

  He knew it ought not to matter anymore, but it did.

  “What is wrong with you?” he whispered, hanging his head. The taste of bile remained in his mouth, and he spit onto the stone floor.

  His face felt flush with embarrassment. Once upon a time, by the river or in a tree, he’d enjoyed isolation for its own sake. For the quiet. But tonight he just wanted to be invisible, to hide from a year’s worth of being the butt of jokes that would only get worse now that word would spread of his vomiting.

  Martin lifted a hand to his mouth, intending to wipe his lips.

  Oh, you asshole.

  He looked at the spit on the ground, tasted bile again, and then looked at his hand—still halfway to his mouth. He let his arm fall weakly to his side.

  What had he been thinking? His colleagues would not be amused by the story of him throwing up; they’d be terrified. Martin shuddered, more unnerved by this dissonance of thought than he’d been by anything else thus far. Sickness … sickness was the problem, the fear. If he’d contracted some illness, there was no shame in that.

  Another shudder. He’d felt warm before, but now he trembled from the chill in the kitchen. The ventilation shafts breathed, drafts swirling, and he could hear their voices like a conversation on the wind.

  He squeezed his eyes closed and opened them wide, realizing how drowsy he’d become. His skin felt clammy, his forehead damp.

  Fever. Oh, you fool. You have a fever.

  Again, Martin looked at the little spot of drying spit on the floor, and another shiver passed through him. He told himself it couldn’t be possible, that any contagion inside the Pandora jar could never have survived for thousands of years—nothing could live that long, not even microbial bacteria. But what did he know? He was no biologist.

  His eyes felt heavy, and he rested his back against one of the stoves and exhaled. Perhaps he ought to just stay here, to hide until it was all over. Shame rushed through him again, but this time he embraced it.

  “Coward,” he said again.

  Something in the kitchen repeated it back to him.

  Martin froze. Only his eyes moved as he glanced around, then at last he turned his head. Could it have been just the ebb and flow of the drafts through the ventilation shafts? Just the whisper of air coming through one of the ancient stovepipes?

  He stood, filtration mask gripped in his left hand. After a moment, he slipped it on. If someone had come down here, either to follow him or—like him—to find some isolation, he did not want to risk exposing them to whatever might be wrong with him.

  Nothing. There’s nothing wrong.

  But there was. It might have been an ordinary virus—he certainly hoped so—but to suggest there had been no effect at all would be foolish.

  “Hello?”

  The team’s lighting fixtures had been left in place, but most were no longer connected. Martin had been sitting in the shadows at the edges of the pool of light, but now he moved into the gloom. He narrowed his eyes but couldn’t seem to focus on the darkness.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m wearing a mask. No chance of exposure. But don’t just … don’t just…”

  His words trailed off. The echo of his own voice was the only sound in the kitchen. Martin felt like an idiot. If someone had come in from the opposite entrance, he’d have heard footsteps, so unless there had been somebody hiding down here when he’d arrived, the whole chamber had to be empty. It could only have been noises filtering through the ventilation shafts from some other room.

  Martin turned to leave. Sophie would need help. It had been a foolish indulgence to come down here.

  Another whisper in the dark.

  But more than a whisper this time. Before, it had seemed an echo of his voice. Now he heard a shuffling sound and a grunting, followed by a whimper. Sounds of a struggle.

  His hands tightened into fists as he turned. It had never occurred to him that there might be other traitors beyond Lamar, but now he fought the urge to run. Something terrible had begun, and if he only ran for help, it would continue. Someone else might die, and he couldn’t live with that.

  “Coward,” someone whispered in the dark, behind one of the columns, near the fourth oven. The scuffling continued, and a muffled, pleading groan.

  Martin strode into shadows at the edge of the lights’ reach, where the soft illumination frosted the stone with a diffuse blue glow, and then he took one more step so that he could see behind the column, beyond the fourth oven.

  Inside the filtration mask, his gasp sounded like a hiss. Two men struggled in the darkness, cast in that same diffuse blue glow. Bearded and clad in only loincloths and rough cloaks, one man had the other from behind, a crude dagger at his throat. Martin knew he had to act, but something about the blue light made him stop. The light seemed too much, the substance of the men too little. For a moment, it seemed like only an image in the dark, a scene projected into the dust motes swirling in the air, and he was merely the audience. The struggling men didn’t even know he was there.

  The victim twisted his head to gaze at Martin. His eyes were pleading, and he spoke words in an utterly unfamiliar tongue. His voice seemed to come from the base of Martin’s brain instead of across the dark space between them.

  The other man grinned and hacked open the victim’s throat with that dull blade.

  When the first man fell, the wan blue light of him began to dim and fade, erasing murderer and victim as if they hadn’t ever been there at all. Except for a spot on Martin’s left eye, a dark spot—a blind spot—that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

  He blinked, and a spike of pain stabbed his head. Martin cried out, the sound trapped with him inside the mask, and he staggered back into the light. He fell to his knees, took deep breaths, waiting for the pain to ebb. When at last it began to subside, he struggled to his feet and toward the exit, thinking only of company. Of Sophie and the others. He had always cherished isolation, but no longer.

  Martin glanced back the way he’d come, but he saw nothing and no one there. No dagger, no struggle, no murder. Yet the shadows seemed pensive, heavy with intent, and the blind spot in his left eye did not go away.

  His heart hammered in his chest, and there were words bubbling up inside him. He knew what he’d seen, but did he dare to tell anyone? Nausea. Fever. Now hallucination? If he told the truth, he’d have all the isolation he could stand, a quarantine within a quarantine.

  Back in the kitchen, the ovens and ventilation shafts continued to breathe and whisper.

  FOURTEEN

  Dr. Tang felt a clock ticking inside her, keenly aware of the hours remaining until dawn and of every minute the battle aboveground continued to wear on. At this rate, it could go on all night, with jihadis out in the dark, waiting for an opportunity and then launching a fresh attack. She told herself it couldn’t possibly last al
l night, that air cover would arrive soon and the jihadis would be decimated. It had been over an hour since the assault had begun. How long would it last? How long before Black Hawk helicopters arrived? How long could the coalition soldiers in camp hold out?

  She had two choices—she could sit in her quarters and wait for the battle to be decided one way or another, or she could do the work that needed doing. Lamar Curtis had murdered four people before being shot to death himself, and she wondered if she could learn anything about why he had done so by examining those remains. No way would she be able to sleep, and curling into a terrified fetal ball seemed pointless, so she decided to go to work.

  The bodies of the dead had been placed in a room in the east wing that still had a lighting rig set up. Much of the wing had been dismantled already, as the workers who had lived there had departed in the previous couple of months, so the corridor and the rooms branching off from it were quiet and only sparsely lit. Dr. Tang appreciated the isolation. Being alone in the quiet helped her to think and helped her to forget the danger overhead.

  She stood in the room and gazed down at the bodies, which had been laid out respectfully, blankets covering them. The weight of the hill above her seemed to grow, and the air in the room to grow thin. It was not like her to be frightened, but she shuddered at the way the blankets lay across the faces of the dead, at the pools of shadow in the depressions where their eyes would be. The fabric seemed to flow there like the darkest water, and the illusion made her blink and shake her head.

  For this task, she had dragged on one of the hazmat suits the USAMRIID techs had brought with them. There were only three. In the ten minutes she’d been wearing this one, it had already become stiflingly warm inside, and sweat trickled down the small of her back. The headpiece provided filtration similar to the masks she had handed out, but still it would be difficult to stay inside the suit for more than an hour, so she knew she had best get to work.

  Inside the suit, she began to sing quietly. The song was “Chicago” by Sufjan Stevens. In medical school, she’d had only a few real friends. None of them had liked Sufjan, or none had admitted it, but this song had that refrain that always haunted her, a strange sort of lullaby. “All things go.”

  She might not have the easiest time getting along with other people, but her heart responded to music. In the car or in the shower, when she knew she was alone, she often sang softly to herself. It lifted her, eased the troubles from her brow and the tension from her shoulders.

  To her knowledge, only her parents had ever heard her sing. If either of them had ever had an opinion about her voice, they’d never mentioned it. They had been flawed creatures, as all parents were—as all people were—but they had loved her, taught her how to live in the world, and if they had not often laughed, they had smiled every day. Her mother had enjoyed whatever might be on the radio, and her father had put classical music on in the background whenever he might be working around the house or fixing the family a meal. But they never sang.

  Dr. Tang’s mother had died young, only forty-two. She’d been feeling unwell for days, had made an appointment to see her doctor, then had a massive heart attack while walking Cookie, their truculent French bulldog. Cookie had wandered home trailing his leash, and twelve-year-old Erika had tutted the naughty beast and backtracked the usual route to meet her mother, a smile on her face. By the time she’d reached the corner of School Street, the EMTs were already there and her mother had died.

  Erika sang more quietly after that, and never when her father was home.

  Now, with only the dead to hear, Dr. Tang sang in a muffled voice while she got down to work. She began with the USAMRIID techs. Methodically, she removed their clothing. The cause of death didn’t concern her—there was no mystery involved in that. She had neither the facilities nor the tools to conduct a proper autopsy. Someone else would do that, eventually.

  The bodies revealed the violence Lamar had perpetrated against them, but Dr. Tang ignored those fatal injuries. What she sought instead was any evidence of unusual illness, signs of infection, though these men hadn’t been exposed to the jar after the seal had cracked—as far as she knew.

  She used a penlight to check inside their mouths, ears, and nostrils, then pressed her fingers into their armpits and groins in search of buboes, although she felt foolish doing it, as any disease she sought would not have been passed by animal bite. If there were plague here, it would have been pneumonic, and given that the men were dead, a simple physical examination would not tell her whether they’d had fever or headache or difficulty breathing. She tried not to let it frustrate her, but it would be extremely difficult to tell Sophie or Kim that they were in no peril without knowing what it was she might be looking for.

  Using her left hand, she forced the younger tech’s jaw open and shone her light within. A shudder of dread touched her as she saw a small wad of bloody phlegm at the back of his mouth. Lamar had attacked the tech, and it was possible the blood originated with that violence. The consistency and color of the fluid troubled her, but all she could do at the moment was make a mental note and move on.

  Dr. Tang left off that Sufjan song in the middle of a verse.

  It took a moment, staring at the dead man, before she realized the singing had not stopped completely. Her breath caught in her throat and she froze, listening. The song continued, but not from her lips.

  Dr. Tang turned. The crinkle of her hazmat suit seemed to disrupt the singer, and the words ceased abruptly. She frowned, staring around the room. There were seven bodies here—two jihadi terrorists, two techs, two sentries, and Lamar Curtis. The room might be fifteen feet by twenty, and it was made quite cold by the depth and the draft that slipped up through the ventilation shaft. She couldn’t feel the draft in her suit, but the temperature seemed to have dropped since she had entered the room.

  She walked to the door and into the corridor. A gently sloping staircase went up to the next level, just twenty feet away, where another hallway led back toward the atrium. Sergeant Dunlap had recruited one of the grad students, outfitted her with a filtration mask, and posted her as a guard up there to make sure nobody else was exposed to the bodies, but that hadn’t been her voice.

  The singing had ceased, but a strange sensation gnawed at her. Sometimes, after her mother’s death, when she had been singing while doing homework in her bedroom, she would get the sudden inescapable feeling that her father stood outside the door, listening to her.

  Dr. Tang had that feeling now, as if someone had been out there in the corridor just a moment before, listening to her sing. She stared into the barely lit corridor and up the stairs, then turned the other direction and gazed into the real darkness of the east wing, certain she was being observed. That she was not alone.

  Nothing moved or breathed in the corridor, so after a moment, she reentered her makeshift morgue. This deep, no light from above filtered through the ventilation shaft. It carried air through carved stone, up into another chamber or through a curve somewhere, but the draft shifted and moved and whispered.

  Someone upstairs, she thought. That was the only explanation.

  A drop of sweat slid down the small of her back, inside her shirt and the hazmat suit. Cold as it was, she could feel it beading on her forehead. Her lips felt dry, and she wet them with her tongue, ignoring the ache in her throat.

  The feeling of being observed remained, but she had a job to do, and so she returned to it.

  The sentries and the jihadis could wait. The corpses of the techs had been her baseline. Now she moved on to Lamar and began to remove his clothing. She found a wallet, two pens, a small tin of breath mints, and—secreted in the inside pocket of his zippered sweatshirt—a small black journal bound in three rubber bands. Dr. Tang set all of this aside as she continued to undress him. She had known Lamar only briefly, but now the intimacy unsettled her … until she recalled that this man had risked all their lives by buckling to whatever pressure or promise the New Caliphate had emp
loyed.

  She saw the rash when she removed his shirt. Angry red, raised blisters ran from the center of his chest along his left side. There were some on his left arm as well. Even with the hazmat suit protecting her, she wanted to rush from the room. Dr. Tang had seen disease and plague, viruses of all kinds, but nobody in her field enjoyed being in the presence of the unknown. It was their job, of course, figuring out what it was and what it might do, but the sight of that rash was enough to make her forget the singing she’d heard, at least for a time.

  His groin and thighs also showed the rash, and there were bruises on his legs that she could not explain, but it was when she pulled up his right eyelid that Dr. Tang felt the deepest dread. Both eyes had a red hue, and a bit of blood had pooled in the corner of the right one. She’d helped to fight the spread of Ebola in West Africa, and memories of those nightmarish days surged in her mind now. This wasn’t the same, but the rash and the red eyes were familiar enough to haunt her.

  This woman with a fever. This woman who found herself hearing things, even seeing things. Hallucinating. There were many symptoms at play here, and if the damned jar actually contained a virus, it was certainly possible that there could be more than one. The myth suggested it.

  Whatever had infected Lamar, it hadn’t been a myth.

  She wondered if that had been part of his calculus, one of the reasons he had betrayed them. His eyes hadn’t been that hue when she’d first met him, so that symptom would have had to develop immediately before or after his death. But the rash, at least, wasn’t new, and it would have terrified him.

  Dr. Tang found herself singing that Sufjan song again.

  “All things go.”

  Dr. Tang had been on her knees. Now she sat back on her haunches and stared at Lamar’s corpse. Whatever else might be going on above- or belowground, there could no longer be any question—there was some kind of contagion in Derveyî.

  She glanced at Lamar’s belongings. Without a lab, without proper equipment, she wasn’t going to be able to get much by way of solid answers—only guesswork, and she had never liked guesswork. But the little book with its multicolored rubber bands might contain some clues if Lamar had made any notes about his illness. Dr. Tang picked up the book, considered looking at it herself, then realized this was something Sophie would want to do. Lamar had been her friend and part of her team. Dr. Tang had never been very good at considering the feelings of others, but once in a while she surprised herself.