PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  But how could something that old be so topographically accurate? It was like the Peruvian stele, which the tests at Willmont seemed to indicate was older than the pyramids it depicted. He had expected his trip to Egypt to do no more than verify a fraud, but in the end both the stele and the passageway existed. And now the Giza stele’s accuracy in turn had led him to this one in Connemara, as if the images were somehow regularly updated. His mother would have loved it: stone maps that magically kept up with Rand McNally.

  Too bad he hadn’t been able to get the telephoto shot of the churchyard stele. But he had plenty of time to rectify that. Best to explore the environs first, he decided.

  He had tried two pubs since landing at Shannon Airport and renting a car for the trip up to Connemara, and he thought he had a handle on Irish culture and commerce, but the pub known as Buskers in the village of Darrig was a departure. In fact, the whole Connemara district seemed to have kept one foot in its desolate past, wild and windswept and dotted with resistance to modernity. As soon as you stepped off the beaten path of tourism and into true Ireland, you found it strewn with stones and loughs and peat bogs and Irish-speaking old-timers reluctant to let you share the quotidian simplicity of their lives. Buskers seemed to be of that ilk off limits to outsiders.

  No neon in the narrow window, no coat of arms above the weathered door, it had two menus, two styles of furnishings, two types of music on the jukebox, and one bespectacled barman to negotiate the differences. It had many libations in a rainbow of colors behind a mirrorless slab of wood lacquered to ebony. The plush stools and single booth by the window were unoccupied and not nearly as worn as the bentwood chairs and benches that marked the deeper recesses of a square room. These were crowded with men in wrinkled coats and shirtsleeves under a pall of stagnant smoke. Checkerboards (draughts) were hemmed with ashtrays and sudsy glasses, and a dartboard seemed to proclaim the line of demarcation between the indigenous and the empty waiting tables up front. Lane sat at the middle of the bar, aware that he had a muting effect on the buzz behind him.

  “A pint,” he said to the barman, who wore half-shell reading glasses and whose newspaper was spread next to the taps. When the dark brew was delivered, he noted: “Mr. M’Gill said you had live music.”

  “And we do. Screamers on Saturdays, trad on Sundays. This is Monday, you’re late, or early, dependin’ on how long you’re stayin’.”

  “Trad?”

  “Traditional. So you’re the one stayin’ at Cooney’s self-caterin’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Welcome to Darrig.”

  “Thank you. I may not be here long, though. Depends . . .” More people were listening than murmuring behind him, and he raised his voice a little to encourage interest. “Depends on how much progress I make out there at Mr. McCabe’s cemetery.”

  The buzz behind him stopped completely.

  “You’ve got business with Brone, have ya?” said the barman, whose name was Shaughnessy.

  “Well, he threw me out on my ass this afternoon, but yes, I’d like to do some research out there for a book.”

  “What kind of book?” This time the voice came from behind him.

  “History.”

  “Ah, we do indeed have a history worth the tellin’, if you don’t leave out the wee folk.”

  “That would be fiction.”

  There was a slight chill, but then the piping voice picked up with alacrity. “Spell my name right.”

  “If the Yank can spell penis, he can spell Enis,” came a deeper timbre.

  Lane swung around. “I’ll give you a whole chapter, if you can tell me about Thiollaney Merriu.”

  Half a dozen men made a rumble of laughter.

  “I’d wear my hand out crossin’ myself if I told you the things have happened at that place,” said skinny Enis Browne.

  “We all know how you wore your hand out, and it wasn’t crossin’ yourself,” the deeper timbre assured him. This was shaggy-headed Flann Macloy.

  “So Brone threw you out, did he?” a third asked Lane.

  “In a matter of speaking.”

  “In a matter of speaking, you’re in good company.”

  “I can see that.”

  “What I mean is, you’re not the first.”

  “No? What’s this Brone’s problem?”

  A calico cat jumped on the bar.

  “He don’t like Yanks,” Flann Macloy said.

  A man with a pipe and a softly weathered face took the edge off the moment. “None that I know of would call Brone McCabe warm and fuzzy, but he’s got more knowledge of Darrig and its history than anyone else in the district, if that’s what you’re after. Not that I’m defendin’ him.”

  “He is a bastard, and you are defendin’ him,” another warmed.

  The last two speakers were Dolan O’Neill and Laughlin O’Brien, the unmatched set, still in competition with each other as they had been since the fabled race to the gates of Thiollaney Merriu to avoid being the last to bury a loved one. Lane, scratching the calico’s neck, began to recede into the periphery.

  “Twenty-eight years and you’ve still not forgiven him for not stayin’ dead, O’Brien.”

  “Don’t matter. My father stopped bein’ the Watcher the second Brone McCabe was in his grave.”

  “McCabe never died” opined through teeth clenched on the stem of Dolan’s brier.

  “You’re all blind as stones. He was dead and that merrow wife of his brought him back.”

  “Your sayin’ it for nearly three decades don’t make it so.”

  “You were there, Dolan, don’t try to tell me you didn’t see the red cape.”

  “I didn’t see it. And I didn’t see the red cap or the sealskin or any of the other magical things you say she was wearin’ that merrows wear to swim in the sea. Nor did anyone else. We was too busy lookin’ at her nakedness, as you well know.”

  “Cap, cape you misconstrue me, and you’re too old to remember. What merrows wear differs county to dale.”

  “You called her cap the cohullen druith for years, and we all wore out listenin’. So don’t tell me I misheard.”

  Flann Macloy waggled his nearly empty glass at Shaughnessy. “Are we drunk enough to be having this argument again?”

  Laughlin sighed. “The point is, Brone must have stole her cape when she came ashore and that’s why she became his obedient wife, like the legends say they do, and so of course she has no memory of her life as a merrow.”

  The retired headmaster, a sodden man named Noel Kelly, suddenly waved his pint of plain. “I’m not prepared to say you’re right, Laughlin O’Brien, and I’m not prepared to say you’re wrong. Like Dolan says, you’ve got other reasons for believin’. But it’s always seemed to me rather strange that she was all wet when she come to save him from the grave, him havin’ drowned an’ all.”

  “There you go, clear enough at last,” Laughlin said, though by this time Lane had the feeling he was watching an old play in which the same conclusions had been lined out again and again. “Una McCabe finds her red cape, like the legend says they always do, and returns to the sea after she puts it on and remembers who she is. But for some reason she comes back on her own.”

  “To save Brone, that’s why.” Macloy flashed a mocking smile as evenly calibrated as a pearl necklace. “He went after her and drowned, don’t you see. ‘Tis true love.”

  A surprised silence set in.

  “That’s not bad,” murmured Enis Browne tentatively. “Not bad at all. It’s taken us twenty-eight years, but I think we’ve finally worked it out.”

  “You’re all a bunch of wooly heads, with dung for brains,” Macloy said into the dregs of his glass as he tipped it straight up.

  “As if you were there, young nipper. And I guess your interest would be the girl.”

  “What of it?”

  “Nothin’, nothin’. Only you’ve got as much chance of marryin’ Sosanna McCabe as catchin’ your own merrow.”

  “What’s
a merrow?”

  They all looked up at Lane Andersen’s abrupt question, as if he were an unwiped stain on the bar.

  “Oh, there’s lots of ‘em about,” said Macloy, rising and sauntering toward Shaughnessy with his empty glass. “Women that live in the sea. We lost a tourist just last year who went out in a boat.”

  Lane met him eye to eye, though the other was half a head taller. “I have no intention of setting foot in a boat. Is this, by any chance, mixed up with horny sailors mistaking sea lions for mermaids and all that tripe?”

  For just a second before he moved to the dartboard with a fresh pint, Macloy’s mocking grin tightened like a clenched fist. The retired headmaster smacked his lips and the others puffed their cigarettes or stared askance. They seemed to have come to an accord.

  “I suppose such lore is quite a queer thing in the States, but you’ll find a wee bit more tolerance for the idea here on the coast of Ireland,” Noel Kelly said at last. “More than one family owns to having merrow blood. The O’Flahertys and O’Sullivans of Kerry and the MacNamaras of Clare are such, and Yeats himself recounts stories the same from Bantry.”

  Lane tried to restore their affability with a smile and a nod. “And this Una is McCabe’s wife?”

  “She is, though no wedding was ever held here.”

  “Very strange woman,” added Enis. “Always standin’ on the cliff in the wind, and some say they’ve seen her as far south as the Cliffs of Moher, on the brink, like Red Mary looking after all the lovers she caused to be cast into the sea.”

  “Or tourists,” footnoted Flann Macloy, landing a dart solidly.

  “Some say she’s the lianhan sidhe herself” Laughlin looked at his hands “an evil seductress. Makes men pass through death to possess her. Which, you know, can be argued is exactly what happened to Brone McCabe.” He glanced at Dolan.

  They were yanking his chain again, Lane saw, but this was precisely the kind of myth he wanted to hear. He stood them a round from the taps, and they obliged him into the night with the finer points of the Irish sidhe, or shee faerie folk, even if most of the time he felt himself marginalized and finally lost to the conversation. They were like eccentric gears whose teeth were memories meshing with each other and driving stories. Lane kept them lubricated, but they grew drunker and more disputatious until Enis Browne hurled a dart that missed the board but caught a framed portrait of the great Irish thoroughbred Rock of Gibraltar mid-rump, cracking the glass and sticking fast. While his companions howled in looping stanzas that only the helplessly inebriated can mount, Shaughnessy himself was less than gracious and declared that “pin the tail on the jackass” was over and he was closing for the night.

  Lane made his way up the street to the door of his rental cottage at the edge of the village. As he fumbled with the lock he felt a gossamer mist lying clammily on his neck, and it was curious, but the mist seemed to gather for a moment after the door opened, as if something were passing on the way out. Apprehension penetrated his dulled senses. He flicked the switch and saw with his first few steps that the rooms were empty. But a pastel green pillow he was sure hadn’t been there before lay on the bed. Hibernian Dream Pillow was printed on the case in emerald stitching, and a tag on the seam read:

  Here is a bit of Irish welcome for you. This

  Bona fide, one hundred percent pure dream

  pillow is guaranteed to carry both true be-

  liever and daring doubter into realms far

  and near.

  Buskers dark beer and rustic clientele had taken him quite far enough for one night, thank you, he thought, pitching face forward on the bed. He fell asleep with his socks on.

  11

  Dream away on the Hibernian Dream Pillow. He did that. Holding night court for his guilt, his fears, his hurts. His mother was there, a defendant at first, and then she was prosecutor, and then the judge. He dreamed the part as the prosecutor twice, refining it, because he was defending himself and he liked his answers. She accused him of cynicism, faithlessness, and an obstinate reliance on a rational world. And he turned it around, asking if there was a gray shade of difference between will, stubbornness and faith. He liked that. It was a good answer. Will, stubbornness and faith. Islamic fundamentalists, the Christian far right, Hindu torch mobs. Will, stubbornness and faith. The guarantors of intolerance. He pled guilty as charged, guilty of logic, of not believing in things made of fear and hope. Before retiring to deliberate, the judge (his mother again) asked him, “If you believed in Satan, could you believe in God?” And he quipped: “As long as it doesn’t have anything to do with religion.”

  That was the dream.

  Reality happened when he awoke so dry that his tongue split at the tip. He turned his neck stiffly and his heart began to pound. . . . drunk, exhausted, he remembered, and tried to drift back to the court of nightly appeals. But now he tasted salty blood and opened his eyes. It was still dark out, though the mist through the window had a kind of luminosity, perhaps the herald of dawn. Perhaps not. He felt so leaden that he knew he hadn’t awakened of his own volition. Something was happening.

  When the grating sounds came again, he recognized them as having been the interruption of the dream. They came from his right, and from his left, and from across the room. Faint scrapings. He rose from the sheets to a sitting position, strained through the gloom. Such a grating! And now he was drawn to three dark holes in the walls. The gloomy oil paintings hung there. The sounds had come from the paintings. He tried to remember what the pictures were, as if their themes might explain it (a man dragging a steamer trunk or a rockslide or the granite lid sliding off the sarcophagus of Khufu), and suddenly the three vague rectangles on the walls swung like scythes 180 degrees.

  He was out of bed in a bound, standing on shaky legs in the middle of the room, his heart in his throat. The damn pictures were hanging upside down! They had moved as if magnetized. It made him think of the Egyptian stele and how it had popped off the pylon in the subterranean pool with a slight magnetic tug.

  He took a step toward the wall opposite the bed, and like actors moving on a blacked-out stage, a flurry of shadows rearranged themselves. He peered hard, moved steadily forward, trying not to change his plane of vision, but by the time he was three feet from the wall he knew that the picture was hanging at eye level just as it should have been, tilted slightly forward from the top. He could even make out that it was a landscape. He remembered then that the other two paintings were of stone structures, and he went for the switch next to the doorway, flooding the room with yellow light from a floor lamp.

  Yes. Kylemore Abbey and Poulnabrone Dolmen on the Burren. Hadn’t the duffers at Buskers gone on and on about the hundred-plus square kilometers of irregular limestone slabs called the Burren, with its caves of ghostly horsemen and humid lakes that appeared and disappeared? And now the picture of it had seemed to his dream-laden mind to be putting on a few moves of its own. Associations, that was all. He was half asleep. Feeling sheepish, he pulled on his trousers and scooped change from the dresser, intent on the soft drink machine up the road outside Cooney’s petrol station.

  Mist swirled into the room when he opened the door, and he carved his way through like a freighter, making for the dull red beacon of the Coke machine. He pattered along in the damp, wishing he had taken time to pull on his shoes.

  And pattered along.

  And pattered . . .

  Where the hell was the thing? He had lost it momentarily. So now, jaws clenched, elbows tight against the chill, he turned back, and that was when he realized he was standing on cobblestones, and he could almost swear the road in front of Cooney’s

  self-catering cottages had been asphalt when he drove in this morning. In fact, where was his rental car? Where was the cottage?

  He had left the door open, the light on in the bedroom, so where was it? How embarrassing. Flann Macloy had bent his ear half the night telling him about tourists lost from boats and in bogs and off cliffs because Red Mary promi
sed herself to anyone who could ride her stallion at a gallop to the edge of some precipice or other without plunging off, but he hadn’t mentioned a thing about stepping out of your self-catered charming Irish cottage and getting lost in a fog.

  Up and down Lane pattered slap, slap, slap. Wet socks stretching out like the toes of a court jester. Right, left, nothing but cobblestones. He had lost the damn side of the road, lost the context. Shades of the Giza Plateau. Ah, that was it. Another association stuck in his subconscious. Another dream.

  Only, how could it be a dream when he was so miserably cold and wet and his pickled brain throbbed like a Lambeg drum in an Ulster parade?

  He refused to call out for Cooney, because if he did, he would win himself a permanent place in the wry folklore of this bumpkin place. He would wait till dawn, if he had too. But then, at last, he saw the crimson Coke machine all lit up, and relief swept over him. Things went better with Coke. He beelined for the blur of red, but begorra it was a long way off.

  He stopped. Either the mist was lifting or the red light was expanding. Abruptly there was a ripple of iridescence, and something like dragon skin reared to a stupendous height, variegated scales lashing the air. Shock compounded shock as once again his secondary senses tried to tell him that this was not a mere dream. The displacement of air beat upon him in waves, and he heard crackling as the writhing thing shattered into globules that rained down in molten puddles. He smelled brimstone and magma. The roar came last, as if bursting through a membrane. But by that time he was buckling and recoiling from bombast and shock. Sensation overwhelmed sense. He fell prostrate against the expected pelting of hot ash.

  Which never came.