Pandora's Temple

by Jon Land

  “Explains what?”

  “Last time I was in these parts, before I got swallowed by the tsunami, instruments got a hit on the temple everybody else discounted because the depth gauge read five hundred feet below the seafloor. I should’ve figured this cavern shit out back then. See what not being under the influence does to me?”

  The Crab continued to churn through the blackness broken only by the spill of its underwater floodlights pouring forward, scattering more blobfish from its path.

  “Boss,” Sal Belamo said suddenly, “something big, really big, dead ahead.”

  Spoken as he slowed the Crab to a crawl, Sal worked his touch screen to make the cameras go to ultraviolet to provide a clearer sense of what lay ahead of them. Silence took over the cabin, the recirculated air that had grown stale and rank only adding to the anxiety that showed itself in the uniformly tight expressions and quick, shallow breathing of the Crab’s occupants. Being on the verge of finding something lost to myth and unseen by man for four thousand years was dramatic in its own right; the fact that discovery had the potential to change, or destroy, the world ratcheted the apprehension up all the more.

  “Maybe some things don’t want to be found.”

  Captain Seven’s warning gained new resonance this deep and this close. In that respect the mythology of Pandora’s “box” and temple had made sure the possibility of its actual existence was never taken seriously. And perhaps that was the point, not coincidence at all.

  McCracken realized he had been holding his breath, when the shape of a large structure, blurred and indistinct, appeared on the main view screen, not yet visible through the front view windows.

  “Make that two hits of acid,” Captain Seven said, sucking on a fake joint.

  “Holy shit,” echoed Sal Belamo, as the structure finally began to take shape before the naked eye as well.

  CHAPTER 77

  The Mediterranean Sea

  “Pandora’s Temple,” McCracken muttered, not believing it himself.

  “You wanna tell me gods designed this place, boss,” Sal Belamo managed, “right now I’m inclined to believe you.”

  “Frigging amazing,” said Captain Seven, pressing out his imaginary joint. “Almost four thousand years and still standing. Well,” he added, as they drew closer and the picture on screen sharpened further, “mostly anyway.”

  The temple’s façade had broken away, its majestic stairs and massive entry lost to the centuries, storms, and pressure of the deep sea. Otherwise, though, the structure looked incredibly intact, even untouched. It sat, buried to varying levels by sand and silt, on the cavern floor, looking to be angled sharply to the right with that side suffering from a significantly lower drop as if the left-most portion had settled on firmer ground.

  At its highest point, the temple stood between fifty and sixty feet. Its marble frieze and majestic dome, myths like everything else about it until now, looked pristine and untouched, the Crab’s powerful floods reflecting off the patches of gold inlay. Even in the dark bleakness of this underwater world, true to its legend the temple appeared to be golden everywhere, a testament to the work of its builder, Pathos Verdes, and his efforts to make optimum use of the light of the day forty centuries before.

  Based on the jagged chasm at the front, the missing entry doors must have indeed been at least twenty feet in height, which, of course, begged the question, Who exactly had they been designed to accommodate? While they’d been too heavy to be opened by any single man, they hadn’t proven strong enough to withstand the tumult of wind, storm, quake, and seawater. Beyond where they had once been, jutting out to the sides and layered atop beveled columns, were twin, multilevel appendages that looked like wings attached seamlessly to the dome.

  “How many years later did the Romans build structures like this?” Katie DeMarco asked, realizing her mouth and lips were bone dry.

  “Maybe fourteen hundred,” McCracken answered, “and they never built anything like this.”

  “Wait,” Johnny Wareagle said, rising out of his seat slightly when something on the Crab’s view screens caught his attention. “Can you pan the cameras back?”

  Belamo slowed the craft and worked the controls, spotting the shapes on the cavern floor that had drawn Wareagle’s attention. “Holy shit, tell me those aren’t—”

  “Shipwrecks,” McCracken completed for him.

  The submarine’s underside cameras caught the remains of any number of underwater crafts comparable to the Crab, both remote and manually operated, twisted and crushed on the cavern floor. Drawing closer, the cameras caught stray bones and skeletal remains as well, broken apart and splintered as if picked clean.

  Wareagle was studying the screens so hard his forehead wrinkled. “Strategic points of their frames were crushed. And those ruptures look more like tears made from the outside in.” He looked toward McCracken. “They were attacked, Blainey. Something destroyed them.”

  “Sea monster,” said Captain Seven. “Just like I told you.”

  CHAPTER 78

  The Mediterranean Sea

  “Guess we know one of the reasons why nobody ever found the temple before,” McCracken managed, as the structure took shape before them.

  Despite the damage wrought by the centuries, it remained a portrait in flawless construction. Save for the missing doors and façade and angle on which it listed, the structure likely exposed once more by the 2012 earthquake and Santorini volcano eruption looked as if it had been assembled right here, perhaps two thousand feet below the surface of the sea. Species of fish McCracken couldn’t identify swam in and out of the open front, giving the temple the appearance of a decorative object placed at the bottom of a massive aquarium.

  “What now, boss?”

  “We all bought our tickets, Sal. Let’s go get our money’s worth.”

  The sub was moving at a crawl when Belamo eased it through the breech in the temple where the façade had stood. The darkness seemed even thicker here inside, an illusion fostered by the sense of claustrophobia within its vast walls and so far underwater to boot. Those walls were octagonal in design, and the lights shining down from the bottom of the Crab radiated off floors of marble flecked with bronze. A number of the pillars connecting the multitiered levels of the temple to the dome were splintered, likely lying somewhere on the temple floor yet reached by the Crab’s floods.

  The interior walls and stairs, unlike the façade, looked remarkably intact, save for algae grown so thick in patches that it took on the shape of vast beings ready to be roused from their sleep. If legend was correct, the temple had spent the bulk of its existence in the wake of being pushed into the sea by the earthquake and massive tsunami that followed. In all likelihood, the chill of the waters this deep had acted as the ultimate preservative even for limestone, its finish only slightly dulled by the centuries.

  Most impressive, and perhaps intimidating, to McCracken were the life-sized statues of what could only be renderings of the gods themselves fashioned from marble. The statues stood almost as high as the entry doors would have had they been intact. Pandora’s Temple, the largest structure ever built by mortal man at the time of its construction, had clearly been sized to accommodate occupants of far greater dimensions than mortal man.

  Suddenly a rumble sounded around them, causing a ripple in the currents trapped inside Pandora’s Temple and forcing the Crab to buck. The temple seemed to quake slightly, the way a skyscraper might in the midst of an earthquake.

  “What the hell was that?” from Sal Belamo.

  “Don’t say it, Captain,” said McCracken.

  But Captain Seven couldn’t help himself. “What do you expect from something that doesn’t want to be found, MacNuts?”

  “Anybody notices a jar lying around, give me a shout,” said Sal Belamo, sweating up a storm now from tension over maneuvering the Crab about without striking anything that might bring the structure down.

  “It’s supposed to be the size of a dude, right?” rai
sed Captain Seven. “Big enough to hold the mother lode of sacred weed.”

  “Opinions and visual renditions of the jar differ,” said McCracken. “But as far as size goes that’s the prevailing thought.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you then, but so far we got no trace of anything even resembling a relic, never mind one that big. ’Course with the right drug, a man can see anything he wants.”

  “Still early in the ride, Captain.”

  The Crab continued to cruise about the temple’s cavernous confines. Here, so far underwater and in darkness, the feeling was that of being contained in a massive tomb, a fact not lost on any of the craft’s occupants, whose heart rates quickened and breathing turned shallow and thin, as if the air was fighting them. There was still nothing given up by the sub’s powerful exterior lighting that even resembled a jar or anything else that might have once filled the structure’s many shelves and built-in storage cases, all of which were empty.

  Then one of the Crab’s lights, and cameras, passed over something ivory colored and rectangular that looked like an extension of the floor itself.

  “Go back, Sal.”

  “Already am, boss. I saw it too.”

  Belamo switched the craft to a hover directly before what from this angle looked like a husk of marble rising from the temple floor, utterly untouched by algae, unlike all other parts of the temple.

  “It looks like a . . . pedestal,” realized Katie DeMarco.

  “That was my thought too,” said McCracken. “Only one on the entire level. Tells me something very important once rested upon it.”

  “It was traditional for the ancient Greeks to display their most valued items on mounts or bases like this,” Katie added.

  Something seemed to catch McCracken’s eye. “Get us closer, Sal.”

  Once he did, nothing further about the pedestal was given up to the naked eye, but under ultraviolet light, the main view screen showed a series of unrecognizable symbols, not unlike hieroglyphics but considerably more detailed and sophisticated at the same time, adorning the pedestal on three sides.

  McCracken leaned forward to better study the symbols, then leaned back slowly with eyes wide and not seeming to blink.

  “Blainey?” Wareagle raised, sending his unease.

  “Any read on that, Captain?” McCracken asked, instead of responding.

  “Why you asking me?”

  “I thought ancient languages were one of your specialties. Basis for those codes you developed in Vietnam.”

  “Stoned maybe. Straight, forget about it. But I don’t have to be stoned to tell you I’ve never come across anything like those symbols before.”

  McCracken nodded. “That’s what I thought. I believe we’ve shown up after the show’s over. Get us out of here, Sal. The jar’s gone. Somebody beat us to it.”

  “What am I missing here, boss?” wondered Sal Belamo. “What’s so important about those symbols on that pedestal?”

  Before McCracken could respond, the rumbling and quaking resumed, only more powerfully. He could feel it along his spine like a feather brushing up against his skin, unsettling him. This time the feeling persisted, as the waters around the Crab bubbled up into a lightly churned froth.

  “Believe it’s time we made our exit, Sal.”

  “Couldn’t agree more, boss.”

  Katie jerked herself forward, straining the bonds of her safety harness. “No, we’ve got to keep looking!”

  “The jar’s not here, young lady,” McCracken told her.

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “How?”

  “Because I think I know where it is.”

  •

  “Get us out of here, Sal,” McCracken continued.

  Belamo had already brought the Crab around and was easing toward the temple’s façade. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

  “There’s something approaching from outside the temple, Blainey,” Wareagle said suddenly, half out of his seat.

  At which point, the sonar screen on Belamo’s main control panel began to flash a warning too. “The big fella’s right, boss.”

  CHAPTER 79

  The Mediterranean Sea

  “Anything?” McCracken asked, after the Crab had emerged through the temple’s open façade.

  Belamo rotated the exterior floodlights that struggled to make a dent in the blackness beyond. “Your guess is as good as mine, boss. Steering back for that vent now. Trip back up should be loads easier than the one down.”

  With the coordinates programmed into the craft’s computer, Belamo worked the controls to cant the submarine on a slight upward climb toward the hydrothermal vent through which they’d originally entered the cavern. Then something big crossed the spill of the lights, a shape that looked more like a pale blotch amid the darkness, and proceeded to slam into the Crab before backing off again.

  “Is that a—”

  “Giant squid,” McCracken completed for Katie DeMarco.

  “And people say drugs make you see things,” managed a wide-eyed Captain Seven. “Guess we don’t need any of them to see this.”

  The monster first seemed to be retreating before laying itself sideways in the water with its caudal fin angled farthest from the Crab, positioned so it could reach out to test its prey with its two extralong tentacles. Its body alone looked to be even longer than the craft and almost as wide. Its eight arms, meanwhile, flailed and thrashed about as if seeking purchase with the attached suction cups.

  “Man, that thing looks mean,” Captain Seven added.

  “At least we know what made that graveyard of wrecks on the cavern floor,” said Sal Belamo.

  The squid’s massive eyes seemed to be peering straight through the view window until it lashed three of its arms against the glass in search of grip. The squid pulled its arms back, the feel of the glass and lack of suction it provided forcing the thing to continue pawing about the craft’s frame.

  “Let’s see if we can give this thing a fight,” McCracken said, taking the chair before the controls of the robotic pincers beyond.

  Belamo twisted the Crab to pull away from the squid and, when that failed, tried to tow it along for the ride. When that strategy failed too, he was left with nothing more to do than use the craft’s engines to hold its ground and fight against the squid’s determined efforts to drag them downward to join the rest of the wrecks in the watery graveyard.

  If McCracken didn’t know better, he’d say the squid was trying to swallow them. But he knew just enough about the creature to figure it saw them as potential prey, having likely feasted on occupants of the other crafts entombed on the cavern floor. And with no whales, the giant squid’s only true predator, in the area, that left nothing above it in the food chain.

  McCracken familiarized himself with the controls for the articulated arms as best and as quickly as he could.

  “I don’t want to push the engine any more than I already am, boss.”

  “Just give me a sec here.”

  He drew the left pincer inside and down, slamming the squid in the side of the mantle, or torso, with a force sufficient to at least stun it. It was like hitting jelly, though. So McCracken opened the left pincers and drove them forward in the same moment he brought the pincer apparatus on the right around to reach the base of the mantle from which the squid’s arms extended and where the gaping black eyes peered out.

  The squid had small fins at the rear of the mantle it used for locomotion. Like other cephalopods, it propelled itself by pulling water into the mantle cavity and pushing the water through the siphon, in gentle rhythmic pulses. The monster could adjust its speed by expanding the cavity to fill it with water, then contracting muscles to jet water through the siphon. McCracken also knew the creature breathed using two large gills inside the same cavity, as difficult to target as the thing’s closed circulatory system.

  These monsters hadn’t existed for tens of thousands of years by being vulnerable.


  The squid found the Crab in its reaches, clamping its arms all along the steel, while its longer tentacles tried to wrap themselves around the entire circumference of the craft. They looked ready to squeeze, perhaps strong enough to pierce the sub’s hull, when McCracken latched one of the pincers onto the far and thinner end portion of the mantle that looked like a tail and closed them tight.

  Outside the view window, something changed in the squid’s eyes. Maybe it was panic, inbred from so many years of avoiding contact with predators and rarely encountering resistance. Based on the creaking sounds that filled the Crab, though, it was actually tightening its hold on the craft more than enough to get McCracken working the second robotic pincer apparatus into place on the tip of the mantle as well. He closed it on the squid’s spongy skin and then worked both pincers into a lifting action.

  The apparatus strained to lift the near eight-hundred-pound weight of the squid, coupled with eight arms’ worth of suction cups fastening into place on the craft’s steel to hold itself in place.

  “Take us down, Sal. Fast.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Belamo dropped the Crab into a dive at the same time McCracken drew both pincers upward. Both gravity and inertia worked in their favor, the combined force just enough to pull the squid’s arms free of the craft and leave it struggling to escape, or at least right itself for another attack.

  “Believe we made our point, boss.”

  Belamo had barely finished his comment, when the squid pulled free of the pincers and lashed at the Crab with its arms, again seeking deadly purchase with its longer tentacles. The creature’s body alone looked to be at least twenty-five feet long, that size nearly doubled when the length of the arms and tentacles was added in; in other words, it was easily bigger than the Crab, which explained why the monster had attacked in the first place. Now, angered and threatened, it wasn’t going anywhere.