PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  (You can’t trust dreams.)

  The mist thickened as quickly as it had thinned. It was raining now, the kind of slow dirge and oily sky that could go on for an eon or two. He had the feeling that the darkness all around him was water, that he stood on a crag somewhere in the void of an earth that was still forming, steaming, cooling, and then that was gone too, and he smelled life, seminal, cycling, rioting from rot. Things slithered close. Adumbrations of obscure biology best forgotten. And then the sensory flow became intermittently familiar: seaweed, pestilent bogs, rank animal exhalations, virile exudations, putrefaction, sweet grass, sultry flowers, and finally . . . voices. Language unknown. Except that the screams needed no translation. Vivid shrieks bursting with horror, gurgling into extinction. A vast ulcer opened in the earth, spiraling down to lightlessness. On the glistening lip there were forms that shouldn’t have been able to exist. He got a single dizzying glimpse before his stomach fell away and syncope dropped him to his knees, eyes closed, ears roaring, gorge rising, scalp tingling.

  He didn’t want to see the hoofed prancer, didn’t want to know what animate thing smelled like offal, wouldn’t allow his eyes to imbue his memory with loathsome details. And it was suddenly manifest to him that sound can curdle your blood when it resonates at precisely the border of man and beast, because he couldn’t deny the humanness of certain moans and he couldn’t ascribe the guttural truculence of certain other ululations that set his teeth on edge. But it all subsided. The sound and the fury utterly gone. And when he gained his feet, it was to stand on a cobblestone street again in the gray dawn.

  But he wasn’t back. Because even though there was a village around him, it wasn’t the one he had left. So he walked in real time and noted the many stone buildings and grew weary and drank from a stream and much further on saw a pylon sticking up in the middle of a pond against a grotto against the sea. But there was no house next to the pond and no grave markers in ordinal rows to flank it. He looked back at the village and it was all mist now, and when he turned again toward the pond that was all mist too. There was a road under his feet, however. An asphalt road. So he walked, and in a few minutes he saw the crimson again, and this time . . . it was a Coke machine.

  His door was still open. Light spilled out into the night. He didn’t want to think. He sat on the floor of the shower stall and drank ice-cold Coke while hot water sprayed over him and ran into the bottle. His feet were bruised and scraped, and he was so exhausted that he left his shredded socks on the tile floor when he dried off. “Dream Pillow,” he murmured, looking at the green pillowslip just before he went to sleep, and even though he knew it couldn’t have a bearing on his state of mind, he pushed it onto the floor.

  12

  It was Mr. Billy moving nervously from one place to another downstairs that broke through Brone’s dreams. The Irishman slid his hand under his wife’s pillow as he had on countless restless nights, seeking affirmation, and when he did not find it, he jolted fully awake. She was gone!

  Swinging upright, he saw her standing to the side of the window in her white gown. The light trapped in the gossamer made her blend with the thin mist on the other side of the glass. She didn’t move when he shuffled to her side. A second chill, this one of pure dread, filled him when he followed her gaze toward the pond. There was no wind and no tide, but even at that distance he could see that the surface of Thiollaney Merriu was dancing with small standing waves.

  “You should have called me,” he mumbled.

  “You don’t have to go out there, you know.”

  There was a warning in her frictionless voice, but what choice did he have? The souls of the dead needed tending. The lives of the living needed protecting. And what of his own fate?

  When he went downstairs and pulled on his boots, Mr. Billy whimpered. Almost as an afterthought, he put the choke chain around the dog’s neck, looping the leader around the heavy table leg.

  “You’ll no follow me this time, Billy. You’ve no sense when it comes to pickin’ a fight. A fight won’t do.”

  There was no defeating it, of course the enemy. Like a Watcher it had its mandate. He could only hope to deal with it. So he hurried to the henhouse first and with a minimum of commotion selected a bird, took it outside, and arced it up over his shoulder in one deft movement that wrung its neck. Across the footbridge and past the first stones he hastened, carrying the limp fowl whose wings flopped open like the segments of a broken umbrella. As he neared the edge of the pond, he slowed. The black water jumped in a way that could only mean there was instability at the bottom. But why now? What had happened? There had been the Yank intruder with the camera hours ago, but other tourists had passed before and wanted to take pictures. Something else must be going on. He peered hard at the choppy surface, trying to assess the depth of the disturbance. Was it in the weeds, the sediment? Or was it beneath the bottom?

  The dead chicken was a pathetic gesture that underscored his powerlessness. He didn’t know how to communicate, or even if his gift would be understood let alone accepted. But a hundred centuries of sacrifices, of choice kills left on savannas, of mountaintop altars running with blood, of virgins stepping into seething calderas, of

  self-mutilations, and babies fed to beasts in jungles was in the history of Man. Should Brone McCabe reject the strategy? Even an animal nature could be appeased.

  He took the dead fowl in both hands like an offering. Where should he leave it? The mud sucked at his boots, casting his efforts in an even more awkward light. A feeble man trying to negotiate with something as old as Man himself how dare he approach! But this was all about approaches, wasn’t it? Approaches, borders, barriers. And wasn’t he on the same side? If not of the border itself, then of the need to defend it?

  It had been eerily still. No crickets, no owls, no humming of insects rising out of the damp grass. But now from the house Mr. Billy began to howl. Sosanna would wake and see him out in the churchyard. He would have to explain in the morning, tell her a fox had been after the chickens and he was baiting it. Or something.

  He reached the grotto with its honeycomb caves and decided he would go no further. A sarsen-like block flanked the highest aperture, and he climbed to the seaward side of that and there placed his warm-feathered token at a point looking down on the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu.

  “I give you the dead,” he offered hoarsely. “Sinner and saint alike, they are yours. Your charge is older than mine. But we aren’t at cross-purposes. I will seal what you seal. So let me guard the livin’ now, and you guard the dead. Give me this side of the grave, and I’ll protect it! I ask only that you harm no one . . . no one who breathes. Bide a while, and give me time. Unlimited time. If you give me time, I’ll keep them out.”

  He stayed a minute longer, watching the pond for a sign. But there was none, though Mr. Billy no longer howled. Perhaps Una was keeping him quiet.

  When at last he made his way down the lower ledges of the grotto, he passed the unused grave plots closest to the pond and felt a shudder. He knew that it was more than an involuntary response to the chill or his own fear. You didn’t walk and breathe among Connemara’s parallel worlds all your life and not know the rules. Three decades ago he had felt the same shudder when he passed over his future grave while crossing the churchyard on the other side of the pond. That was where he was buried the first time. It had struck him just like tonight: a tremor beginning at the back of the neck and flowing down his body. And three months later the villagers were lowering him into the ground on that very spot.

  He had escaped interment then, but here was another. This would be his grave again, or close by. He wondered if the shudder was the answer to his ritual act and the brazen petition he had made, and he remembered the hint of impending doom in Una’s frictionless voice when she questioned his coming out into the churchyard.

  13

  She fisted the middle of the door firmly three times and stood squarely on the threshold when Lane answered. He had expected to see
Cooney and he edged behind the jamb with just a towel around his waist, but she took three brisk steps into the middle of the room. For all that, he sensed she was a little nervous, that this wasn’t the kind of thing she normally did.

  “I couldn’t wait any longer,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For you. I’ve been sitting in the car outside half the morning.”

  She didn’t look infatuated, and she didn’t look like a prostitute. Red hair,

  mid-twenties, lean and toned, she looked enthused. All her ducks in a row, he thought, searching his memory for a fuzzy chapter in last night’s drinking. “Have we met, Ms.

  . . . ?”

  “Doreen Brynn.” She stuck out an alabaster hand, and he nearly let go of the towel reciprocating. “And you are Lane Andersen.”

  “You have no idea how glad I am to hear that.”

  “Everyone’s talking about the American visitor, and when I heard your name ”

  “Me?”

  “Of course. I happened to have your book with me when I heard, and then Cooney saw your picture on the back cover and ”

  He gestured for her to keep talking as he went to the bedroom to pull on some clothes, but he had to close the door in her face to keep her from following. In a raised voice she told him how thrilled she was that someone of his intellectual status had come to their little backwater of the world. “This village is medieval. Not even. A shaman would recognize it, a druid.”

  “Who are you?” he enunciated clearly to get her focused.

  “Oh. Sorry. I’m Doreen Brynn.”

  “I got that.”

  “I’m sort of the librarian. That is I’d be the librarian if we had a decent library which I’ve been trying to establish for seven years now. I run a used book and curio store, and I teach at the school three afternoons a week.”

  “You don’t sound Irish,” he called out of the bedroom.

  “Mum came here from Liverpool after she divorced the old man. Now I’m bloody thirty, can you believe it? Why I didn’t leave Darrig a decade ago and go to America is an absolute mystery. I should have majored in women’s studies at Wellesley or Smith or one of those Seven Sisters you’ve got there in the east.”

  “Bryn Mawr.”

  “What?”

  “You said your name was Brynn. You should’ve gone to Bryn Mawr.”

  “Thank you. Anyway, here I am this village is so backward and I’ve made it my life’s mission to drag Darrig kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. And that’s why I want you to come speak at the library meeting tonight.”

  He came out of the bedroom in shorts and a T-shirt, and she handed him a pen and her copy of his book.

  “Check my references,” he said. “I bombed at Buskers last night.”

  “Oh, that’s quite another crowd. Men . . . uh. You get to meet Darrig’s women tonight. If you don’t come, it’ll be Mrs. O’Neill reading James Joyce again, and no one understands a word of it.”

  He signed the book, handed it back to her.

  “And I’ll order copies of 13 Myths that Shape the World for a signing some time, if you come,” she added.

  He scrutinized her. “Do you know what Thiollaney Merriu means?”

  “McCabe’s churchyard? No. But I will by tonight, if you come early.”

  ***

  There were no marks on the walls where the pictures had swung upside down, no shredded sweat socks lying in a damp mound over the shower drain, and of course he was sober now. So it never happened. Or if it did, it was because the Dream Pillow was some kind of olfactory hallucinogen. He picked it off the floor, sniffed it, thought he detected faint aromas of mint and thyme. Oh, the deviltry of rustics! Well, he would have to sleep on it some more as research for the new book. If he could get the damn thing through customs without being busted for drugs, he’d have Professor Claiborne, the head of the chemistry department at Willmont, tear it open and analyze whatever was inside.

  “I’m going to steal your Dream Pillow,” he told Cooney M’Gill later. “I’ll pay for it now if you want.”

  “Dream Pillow?” the old-timer gummed. “What’s that?”

  He hadn’t brought the pillow Lane described, and he didn’t know who could have gone into the cottage. That left the Gideon Bible Society and the little folk for suspects. Still feeling like warmed-over roadkill, Lane spent what remained of the afternoon on his laptop, tracing down Irish folk tales he had picked up at Buskers the night before and searching for anything and everything he could glean of Darrig’s history, which is to say a bare-bones litany of family names, settlement dates and one myopic personal remembrance. He learned more from Doreen Brynn at The Book Bog half an hour before the back room of her rambling shop filled up.

  “It’s a corruption,” she said of the name Thiollaney Merriu.

  “A corruption of what?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. Maybe a root synthesis of a couple of things, because it seems to have traveled well. Apparently it’s closest to Manx Gaelic, which comes from the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea.”

  He looked at her impatiently.

  “It sort of means, ‘the tunneling dead,’” she said.

  “The tunneling dead. Mother would have loved it.”

  “Eh?”

  “Nothing. Just that the world of the living loves nothing more than the world of the dead. Thank you, Ms. Brynn. I’m on the right track.”

  “Of what?”

  He wanted to tell her, to share the pieces of his latest puzzle with a sane person in a gullible corner of the world, but of course, if he was going to tell garrulous Doreen Brynn, he might as well serialize his book on the Net. So by way of answer he plied her with questions about Darrig. She was a good researcher and in a few minutes she had several books in front of him, supplemented with photos and web sites he had missed on his laptop. The photos in particular engaged him, because they seemed vaguely familiar.

  “That one . . . can you shrink the window so the whole thing fits?”

  She clicked a badly shot and faded daguerreotype into perspective.

  “That’s a cobblestone street,” he said.

  “Not surprising, considering you’re looking at the village in 1853.”

  “Except . . . there was a mill there. On the end there. Beyond the last building. It had a wheel.”

  “Quilligan’s Mill. Yes. It burned down in the 1840’s. How did you know that?”

  He pulled his finger back from the screen. “I must have seen it this afternoon. On my laptop.”

  “Mercy. Find it for me, will you? I didn’t know there was a photo of the mill.”

  He shrugged. “I haven’t any idea where to look again.”

  He had found it in the dream, of course. Last night he had stood in a mist watching a past he could not have known shuffle before his eyes. How could that be? For just a moment he felt the unnerving abandonment of his childhood again, that sense of being lost in a world without order, without someone in charge. But, of course, someone or something was in charge. Rationality was in charge. He had spent his adult life proving that, and he would prove it again, even though these moments still came to him here and there, now and then, that showed he had yet to outgrow the lie, the demand for faith and trust in what was essentially flakiness. Put on a cosmic plane, flakiness became disorder and chaos. He didn’t want a universe like that. If he accepted that, he would have to trust in something more powerful than himself to keep it in check. And of all the things in life that had more power than he, what was there that he had ever been able to trust?

  Nothing. Trust No One Fox Mulder.

  So, even if he had to go to the bottom of the barrel for an answer right now, there would be plenty of better explanations eventually. For the moment you could suppose that a few generations exposed to the fecund Connemara air had so kindled Irish brains that all kinds of mental acrobatics took place. Not just a belief in chimerical “little people,” but in telepathy and racial memory and oneir
ic powers. And into that comes Lane Andersen, drinking till he is crap-faced at Buskers, thus lowering his resistance to delusions in the company of men who love to spook tourists, and then he goes home and zonks on a pillow that was probably stuffed by a Colombian drug lord or at least the local herbalist, and you blend that in with the possibility of some kind of thought transfer from these tenth degree adepts of abracadabra, and yeah, something could have gotten into his mind, his dreams. Only, if there wasn’t any picture of the mill, then

  “How do you know about the mill?” he asked Doreen Brynn.

  “How? I guess I read about it. And I may have seen a sketch.”

  There. Mystery solved. If the local librarian-elect could know about it, then so could everyone else.

  By this time the dozen chairs behind them were nearly filled: seven women and four men sitting like prim passengers in a bus waiting for the driver.

  Whenever he spoke to groups Lane Andersen tended to mumble through personal asides in search of a reason for being there. His eyes would wander high about the confining room, and he would glance wistfully toward the nearest door. But the revelation of tunneling implicit in the name Thiollaney Merriu, and the remote viewing that had apparently come to him in a dream, had gotten him past self-consciousness. A feeling of reckless confidence warmed him to his forte.

  He began by dismissing superstition as the bane of mankind and gave a withering summary of the world’s wars, atrocities and genocides perpetrated through excesses of idolatry. Seven women and four men received this cheery litany grim-faced while he segued into the comic relief phase of his presentation. It was his standard speech 101, delivered successfully to many audiences. Friendly audiences. Audiences who had read his book and knew where he was coming from. But except for Doreen Brynn, no one in the back room of The Book Bog in the little village of Darrig, Ireland, had read his book. They were just now catching up with Angela’s Ashes and A Brief History of Time. So the comic relief, in which he summoned an amusing history of frauds, hoaxes and sublimely ridiculous sacred cows from the collective of mankind, left them blank.