The Pandora Room: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  Smoke Break cleared his throat and spat onto the floor. In the yellow light, it looked the same black and red as what had seeped from April’s face.

  “Stand aside, soldier. Both of you,” Smoke Break drawled. “We’re taking those masks if we have to strip ’em off ourselves. And then I guess we’re going down into that room and smashing that fucking jar.”

  Carson lifted his weapon and took aim at Smoke Break’s head. “Jesus, you are stupid. If whatever’s wrong with you came from the jar, how is smashing it going to do anything but infect more people?”

  April hefted her knife. “Everyone in Derveyî is already infected, at least the way I figure it. Except maybe you people in your masks. Frankly, I think it’s only a matter of time for you, masks or no masks. They’re gonna keep this place quarantined. People are going to start dying, and they’re going to end up building a fence around Derveyî and treating it like Chernobyl or that nuclear plant in Japan. They’re not going to let anyone within miles of this place. But if the jar gets out of here, who knows how many people will get sick?”

  Smoke Break took another step. The two other guys moved forward with him, fanning out to right and left as if they might try to attack.

  “That’s not up to you to decide,” Taejon said. “It’s above your pay grade—and mine, too.”

  “Oh, but dying isn’t?” asked one of the other men, his throat thick and rasping. He burst into a fit of coughing.

  April rubbed at her eyes. Taejon thought she might be crying, but then he saw that what trickled down from her eyes was blood instead of tears.

  “The rest of you can fight over the masks,” she said, voice rasping as she tried to clear her throat. “I don’t care as much about that. I figure I’m already sick, but I’m not leaving that jar intact. Get out of my way, Corporal.”

  She started forward.

  Taejon shifted closer to the open stairwell door, raised his weapon to his shoulder, and aimed at the center of her chest. “Ma’am, do not take another step.”

  April did. Just one more. Taejon shifted his weapon to the right and fired into the shadows of the column room, beyond the reach of the lighting rig. The gunshots echoed back to him, and he thought of the ghosts in the Pandora Room and the fact that he’d been feeling feverish, and then he pushed all such thoughts away. A woman with a knife was easier to handle than the question of madness, the question of ghosts.

  “Fuck this,” Smoke Break said. “You’re not gonna shoot her, or any of us. And we want those goddamn masks.”

  April raised her hands as if to surrender herself and started walking toward Taejon, who shouted at her to stop, aimed again at her chest, and hesitated. The blackish blood still seeped down her cheek, and now he saw the deep purple bruising on her throat and the festering sores there. Her eyes had gone fiercely bloodshot.

  “No, damn it, listen to me!” Taejon shouted. “I don’t wanna—”

  She burst out coughing. Bloody black phlegm sprayed from her mouth and spattered the floor just inches from his boots, and he pulled the trigger by reflex, stitching bullets across her body from left thigh to right shoulder as she staggered backward and then slumped to the floor with a wet slap, even as the echo of gunfire slithered again into the shadows.

  Carson turned toward Taejon. “Oh, shit! Oh, Jesus, Tay, what did you—”

  Smoke Break roared something unintelligible as fear finally broke him. He and the other men rushed at Taejon. Carson tried to get between them, and two of them broke off attacking Taejon to take him down. Smoke Break got a hand on Taejon’s weapon, and they were wrestling for it, Taejon taller but Smoke Break so much stronger. But the son of a bitch started coughing, great racking brays that sounded like they were tearing his throat and lungs apart. Still he fought, yanked, tried to rip Taejon’s weapon from his grasp, and Taejon pulled the trigger, shot him in the gut and groin, then kicked him away and shot him through the head.

  To his left, Carson struggled with the other two. One man had ripped his gun from his grasp, and the other used both hands to tear off Carson’s filtration mask. Carson fought back, trying to hold on to the mask, but they were yanking at his arms and hair, screaming and coughing, and they tripped him up. Carson hit the floor hard. One of them tugged up his own shirt to show the hideous rash on his side and abdomen, kicked Carson twice, then picked up Carson’s weapon and took aim.

  Taejon shot the guy once through the chest, center mass, and he dropped. The other man took three bullets before he went down.

  Carson fell to his knees, staring at the dead men and the signs of their disease, then picking up the torn filtration mask, trying to figure out a way to mend it. They both knew there weren’t any spares. Taejon had stopped the men attacking him, maybe even saved his life, at least for now. But these had been ordinary people, mostly kind and intelligent and hardworking, and he’d just had to kill them all.

  He turned away from Carson, stomach churning, bile rushing up the back of his throat. His hands flew to his mask, and then he thought of the sores and the blood and the coughing and he choked back down his revulsion and horror.

  Down in the Pandora Room, the ghosts had gone quiet. But Taejon couldn’t help thinking that up here in this place, he had created more.

  * * *

  Sophie came awake with a start, lost in darkness, head pounding and throat aching. Her eyes felt like she’d had a visit from the sandman, and she rubbed at the grit, careful not to push aside her filtration mask. She ought to be safe alone in her room, with nobody there to pass along the contagion, but she wanted to take no chances. Moaning quietly, she squinted at the shadowed figure shaking her awake.

  “Okay. You got me,” she rasped, knocking the offending hand away.

  The person backed off, and in the low light coming from the softly glowing lantern in the corner, Sophie saw it was Dr. Tang.

  “What the hell’s wrong now?” Sophie asked. “If I’m gonna die before morning, you could have had the decency to let me sleep through it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Tang said, reaching over to the adjacent bed and picking up a clear, sealed plastic bag. “With all that’s going on, I’d forgotten about this, but I think it could be important. If we have any chance of learning more, I realized that chance might be here.”

  “What is that stuff?”

  Dr. Tang unsealed the bag, reached inside. “The things I took from Lamar’s pockets when I examined his remains.” She withdrew a small journal bound with rubber bands and resealed the bag before tossing it back on the empty bed. “This is his.”

  “Of course it is,” Sophie said. “He wrote in it constantly while he was…” She swung her legs off the bed, taking the journal from Dr. Tang’s hand. “While he was translating. Of course. If he found something about hallucinations, or the symptoms, he might not have told me. Not if he was working with the New Caliphate.”

  She held the journal, wishing she had latex gloves or something. What she wanted more than anything from this book was the one thing she doubted she would find inside—understanding. Lamar had been loyal to her. They had trusted each other. She allowed very few into the intimate space around her, had been hurt too much by sickness and loss and so kept the world at arm’s length, but Lamar had been an exception. If she could just understand why he’d done what he had done, she might begin to, if not forgive him, at least hate him a little less.

  “Thank you,” she said, slipping off the rubber bands.

  Dr. Tang sat on the spare bed in silence while Sophie began to flip pages. The early pages were no surprise, as Lamar had given her highlights throughout the days he’d spent translating. She found herself skimming through the tale of Pandora and Anesidora and the two jars given to them by the gods. Lamar’s neat, slanted writing began with large, looping letters, but as she turned the pages, the entries grew less legible, the writing smaller and sharper, until she had to decipher a scribble.

  “Whatever was going on with him, it didn’t happen suddenly,” she sai
d, glancing up at Dr. Tang.

  “You think he was sick earlier than we thought?” the doctor asked.

  “Sick, or under a lot of pressure, which would make sense if the jihadis were threatening him somehow.”

  Dr. Tang tilted her head in the birdlike way she had, but she said nothing. Sophie knew the woman must have already made up her mind about Lamar’s betrayal, but for her it did not seem so clear. The more she turned it over in her head, the more she tried to swallow that Lamar had been a spy and a traitor, the more she believed she had been too quick to just accept that theory. He had betrayed her, yes. But there had to be a reason.

  In the quiet chill underground, she turned her attention back to the book, deciphering not just translations but little notes and questions that Lamar had jotted to himself.

  She turned the page and saw a break, a slash of white space about a third of the way down the page. Written there were three emphatic words, the second one underlined. What’s this now?

  Exhausted, head aching, she had to focus on the scrawl. Lamar had given up recording a direct translation, instead marking some lines and phrases and summing up his revelations in bursts of confused, almost breathless writing. Sophie read two and a half pages in numb astonishment before flipping back and starting through them again. Before she went any further, she had to be sure she had interpreted Lamar’s claims properly.

  “My God,” she rasped, sore throat stinging.

  “What is it?” Dr. Tang asked.

  Sophie glanced up at her, unable to keep herself from smiling. Lamar had betrayed her—had even kept all of this from her—but if she could confirm his translations and assumptions, the discovery of the Pandora Room had just become even more valuable.

  “If this is true,” she said, waving the journal, “it changes everything.”

  Dr. Tang sat up straighter, leaning forward. “Does it say what was in the jar? Any information might be vital to helping the people who are sick.”

  “Nothing like that,” Sophie said. “Not that I’ve read so far.” She saw Dr. Tang deflate a little, and felt she had to forge on to justify her own excitement. “What if I told you the Pandora myth has an older root? That the jar isn’t Greek at all?”

  Dr. Tang twitched her head. “Pandora is a Greek myth. You said yourself that there are variations, but—”

  “Yes, it’s a Greek myth. But we know there were no gods on Olympus. We have a jar, which had to come from somewhere. If it didn’t come from Zeus, where did it come from?”

  Dr. Tang raised her eyebrows. “From your tone, I presume you are about to tell me.”

  Again, Sophie waved the journal. “Lamar told us. Or at least he wrote down what he thought he’d translated from the altar and the jar. What do you know about the Thera eruption?”

  “A little. Thera is the circle of Greek islands that includes Santorini. Once they were one big island. Most of it exploded, when, about 2000 B.C.E.?”

  “Not bad. But let me back up,” Sophie said, glancing again at the journal’s pages while she spoke. “Minoan civilization sprawled across much of the Aegean during the Bronze Age. It’s named after King Minos of Crete, he of the labyrinth and the minotaur in Greek myth. The Minoans predated the Mycenaeans, which is where we get the beginnings of Greek mythology, all of that. There were Minoan settlements all over the place, including at Akrotiri, on Thera.”

  “I’ve been there,” Dr. Tang said. “Some archaeologists think the destruction of Akrotiri is the origin of the story of Atlantis.”

  Sophie rolled her eyes. They itched, and it made her head throb even harder, but she ignored the pain and forged onward. “Okay. I believe anything is possible after what we’ve found, but there are so many theories about the seed of the Atlantis myth.” She flapped one hand. “Doesn’t matter. The point is that the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri was obliterated in a volcanic eruption so enormous that Chinese and Egyptian records from the era—in the seventeenth century B.C.E.—note atmospheric and weather changes that almost certainly coincide.”

  Dr. Tang blinked tiredly. “Go on.”

  “Don’t fall asleep on me. This is important.”

  “I’m awake.”

  Sophie didn’t really need an audience, but it helped her to say this aloud, to make it real as she sorted it out in her brain. As she did, synapses began to fire, not just in her brain but between pieces of information in Lamar’s journal.

  “On second thought,” she said, glancing back to the journal, “maybe the Atlantis seed was Akrotiri after all. Lamar translates a section of the writing that discusses a city he translated as Locri. The Minoan settlement on Thera became this place, Locri, whose people were viewed by the Mycenaeans as wise and just and peaceful neighbors. The city was considered a place of ‘wondrous invention and music and art and magic.’ Atlantis, El Dorado, Shangri-La … there are so many legends like this, and we can now add Locri to those. But the Locritians, or whatever we want to call them, started to fade. The bloom came off the rose, I guess. They stopped having children, stopped making art.”

  Dr. Tang gestured to the journal. “Does Lamar say why?”

  Sophie felt a chill. The journal felt strangely warm. “What he says is that the Locritians traded with other islands, beyond the control of the Minoans, including some that would soon be absorbed by Mycenaean culture.”

  “I appreciate the history lesson, but I begin to regret waking you for this,” Dr. Tang said. “If it won’t help us determine what’s in the jar—”

  “I haven’t gotten that far,” Sophie said, forcing herself not to be curt.

  “Perhaps you should.”

  “You’re not hearing me. These people of Locri, they sound so wonderful, right? Capable of almost anything. Almost like gods.”

  Dr. Tang perked up. “You’re saying Locri is Olympus.”

  “Not at all. But stories shift and change in the telling, passing down across centuries. Legends and myths especially grow and adapt to serve the people who need them, who cling to them. What I’m saying is that, according to Lamar, the writing on the wall down there says the people of Locri gave their Greek trading partners two jars and claimed one contained gifts they would not be prepared to use for…” She glanced at Lamar’s notes in the journal and read aloud. “‘Gifts they would not understand for three centuries.’”

  Sophie glanced up again. “The other jar contained all the curses of humanity. Lamar wrote that phrase, but there’s more.” Her finger traced the line in the journal. “‘The cruelties and frailties of all the hearts in Locri, and the plague of our bodies.’”

  Dr. Tang leaned toward her, eyes flaring with uncharacteristic anger. “It’s another version of the same story, Sophie. You’re not thinking. So whoever wrote that on the wall told the earliest Greek iteration of the Pandora legend, and elsewhere they inscribed this one. Forgive me, I’ll be fascinated later, when I’m sure we’re not all going to die down here.”

  Sophie flinched. She nodded, taking even breaths.

  “You may be right,” she said, “but I don’t think so. Yes, Lamar wrote that he thinks the language down there is influenced by Minoan language, might be the key to translating Minoan—a language that’s never been deciphered. That jar might be the most priceless artifact in modern archaeological history.”

  “You’re not listening—”

  “Dr. Tang, please.” Sophie held up the journal. “I am listening. And I’m going to keep reading. The story of the jar is in here. I don’t know how far Lamar got, but we might get answers yet.”

  The two women stared at each other a moment, and then Dr. Tang lay back on the bed.

  “Keep reading, then,” the doctor said. “I don’t need the background. Just an answer.”

  Sophie glared at her but knew Dr. Tang was right. She opened the journal and found her place, had to skip an urgently scribbled phrase or two, but kept working at it. As she read, she found herself missing Lamar, despite what he’d done. This journal felt like his last commun
ication to her, but then she remembered that he’d experienced these epiphanies while working in the Pandora Room, sometimes with her and Beyza right there beside him, and never told her. It ought to have made her furious, she thought, but instead it just hurt. His handwriting showed his distress, but she wondered if she would ever know the true reasons for his betrayal, and if knowing would make her feel any better.

  She paused, staring at a line on the page.

  Her hand shook.

  “Doctor,” she said quietly.

  Something in her voice must have excited or alarmed Dr. Tang, for the woman sat up abruptly.

  “What did you find?”

  “Ghosts,” Sophie said, her sore throat tightening. She met Dr. Tang’s gaze. “Lamar was seeing ghosts.”

  Before she could explain, they heard footfalls, and then Sergeant Dunlap shoved aside the curtain and entered Sophie’s room without asking permission.

  “Sergeant, what—” Sophie began.

  “I’m sorry, but you both need to come with me right now,” Dunlap said. “There’s been trouble in the Pandora Room.”

  Sophie slipped rubber bands back onto the journal and stood, stuffing it into her back pocket.

  “What happened?” she asked as Dr. Tang rose to join them.

  Dunlap held the curtain back, and they all rushed into the corridor together.

  “More of your team are sick than you thought, and worse than you thought,” Dunlap said. “People are dead.”

  Dr. Tang grabbed his arm. “This sickness killed them?”

  “No,” Dunlap said, warily checking the shadowed tunnels with his weapon at the ready. “The bullets did that.”

  NINETEEN

  Alton Carr had never missed his mother the way he did now, in these moments when he feared that the sickness growing in him—in so many of them—might be the thing that killed him. He came from a family whose men had often died young, or so his father had often told him. Both of his grandfathers had been coal miners in Northumberland, in the northeast of England, and both had died young, lungs black and clogged. His father’s oldest brother had died in a cave-in, and though Alton’s father had never been a miner himself, he had been raised in a family whose fabric was woven through with hard work, grim practicality, and whiskey. They’d accepted their lot, no matter how bleak, and he tried to remember that now as he weighed his own fate.