PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  He really didn’t like what happened next. Because the thing about stone is that there is no absorption; it passes disturbances along virtually intact. And that’s what he thought he felt now, a steady disturbance. Something coming. Slithering, rising, filling its smooth burrow as it moved, as if the tube itself were performing peristaltic contractions.

  The air seemed suddenly thin and his hands began to sweat. He jerked to his feet, swung the flashlight. The inner wall sloped up to the lowest tier of channels, six or seven levels below the one he had fallen through. Chutes and Ladders, he thought. And now he needed a ladder.

  The largest hole looked impossibly small, but he sprang up the ascent with driving steps and dove. It swallowed him pack and all as he wedged elbows, knees and toes against the sides, inching along. He struggled until he gained the point where the pitch began to level out, and somehow he managed to hang onto the flashlight, though the beam shot everywhere and nowhere.

  He could hear it now. Not just feel the vibration, he could hear it. It must be long and powerful. And then it came to him that when it slithered out of the pit into the nest, or whatever that chamber was, it would be too big to enter the smaller tubes. He almost laughed out loud with relief. Adrenaline drained out of him, easing the torment of the abrasive climb. The gestating female came through the large pits, and the viper young or whatever they were exited through the smaller tubes, so the parent couldn’t could not follow him. But what if the young came down? Or what if the adult’s boneless vermiform shape just thinned to whatever opening would accommodate it?

  Don’t think. Just climb.

  He climbed, he scrambled but it was sweltering. Hermetic (like a yellow bus full of cooking children on a hot day). His clothes were soaked and his arms felt like lead pendulums. He could barely breathe and the damn tube was frustrating his every move, bruising his skin, hard against his back (like a papoose board). For a few giddy moments he felt as if he himself was a worm trying to penetrate stone. He wanted to scream and flail. How did worms keep from suffocating? How . . . did . . . they . . . find . . . their . . . way . . . out!

  And then he remembered that he had to change levels if he wanted to get back to where he had started, because he was moving on an angle in the lowest tier of countless channels, whereas he had entered from somewhere in the middle. Then again, there was no guarantee that all the tubes led back to the grotto. Real panic began hammering inside his head, awakening survival instincts, shouting down the measured voice that always informed his actions, because:

  He didn’t like tight places!

  There were holes and connectors and he needed to move UP! Chutes and ladders, chutes and ladders . . . Easy to see how Mad Darby went mad. You couldn’t endure this panic-driven keenness for long and remain sane. Contorting, wriggling, bending you took on the instincts of a burrowing thing. The tubes around him seemed to hum and hiss with the intimacy of the earth, and something loose began to punctuate his gasps, a little vocalization he didn’t recognize as coming out of himself. And then the sound of his breathing was blunted and he shook the sweat out of his eyes and aimed the flashlight past his chin at a solid dome of stone four inches from his raised face.

  He had reached a dead end, and there was no time to equivocate, no decision to make. He had one chance: to reverse directions and find a way into another tube before whatever was pursuing him had him trapped.

  If crawling away from an unknown horror was petrifying, crawling backward toward it was heart-stopping. His boots scraped while his brain anticipated the sudden thud of fangs through well-worn soles. The impression that he was being dragged downward was repeated each time there was friction between his pant legs and the stone. And then he felt the open space of the first connector and banged through into an adjacent channel.

  Up he went again, certain now that the susurrant murmur behind him had also entered the smaller tubes. In fact, it sounded almost even with him. What if it passed in another channel and came up in front of him? What if there was more than one? In quick succession he passed a lattice of small holes, and when he glanced across through the last one, he froze.

  Something was glittering back.

  Hand trembling, he brought the flashlight beam to bear, expecting to find eyes or slime or saliva dripping just inches away on the other side of the stone trellis. But it wasn’t in the next tube. He could see through a successive hole into a third tube lying parallel and below his position, and that was where the glitter was.

  For the second time he felt like laughing in relief. Because it wasn’t some serpentine creature chasing him, and the hum and the hiss weren’t from the fauces of a dragon’s throat. The sound and the glitter came from the recurrent surge of water. The tide was coming in! “It’s the water,” he had postulated into his digital recorder while walking along the beach. Wasn’t that funny? And a little humbling, too, if he was going to be honest about it. Because he really had begun to lose it. He couldn’t deny that the superstition, the fear, the backwardness, the primitive inventions of the imagination, and now his own fear, had given things an ironic twist, showing him how vulnerable and hypocritical he was.

  Only, there wasn’t any reason to celebrate yet, because the tide was catenating through pockets and channels in the cliff, and each rush brought it higher. As if to emphasize the point, a chill suddenly enveloped his lower leg just before a black film coasted opposite his face through the lattice.

  He scrambled and climbed, climbed and scrambled, but already he suspected that most of the tubes were blind alleys. Where was the light? It couldn’t be this dark outside already, could it? He’ll lead you out of danger, if you look for his light, Abban had said about Mad Darby.

  Lane switched off his flashlight.

  It took an agonizing moment or two, but very faintly he made out something less than total blackness. Another connector hole lay a few feet ahead. He clawed forward to the rim, hauled himself even. The light now was slightly stronger; and so were the pops and gurgles as the tide forced air out of cavities below him. Groping his way into the next tube, he craned hard to pick up the faint light again through yet another connector. And thank you, Mad Darby there it was. The trail of breadcrumbs, the silver thread, a path of light that got stronger and stronger until Lane Andersen at last drew himself exhausted into the grotto where an eternity ago, it seemed, he had begun his odyssey.

  He lay for several minutes listening to the tide sluice through the cliff. Doreen Brynn had told him the sea was unpredictable along Thiollaney Merriu. She had shown him an article that attempted to explain the odd marine topography in that region and how the rotational energy of the earth colluded with solar and lunar gravitational effects. What he had understood was that it defied tidal models and that old-timers claimed it could come in at the wrong time and higher than the Bay of Fundy. A slight exaggeration, he had thought, but at the moment he wasn’t going to contest either point. Something in the way the waves hit the cliff (Bernoulli’s principle or maybe Mad Darby’s Chutes and Ladders effect) had it all over any water cannon he had ever seen.

  But he had survived.

  He had survived despite believing he was about to die. And once again, as he had in Egypt, he realized that some part of him had thrived on the danger. At the moment of anticipated death he had felt intensely alive. And now he felt rock steady, energized, elated. Adrenaline junkie, he mocked himself with a touch of self-contained hubris. Nothing like a stolen adventure with no one the wiser once it was over.

  And then he passed between the sarsen stones onto the fringe of the grotto and saw that the basins were filled with black water, cutting him off from the rest of the churchyard. Across from him, less than thirty feet away, stood Brone McCabe.

  ***

  They stared at each other like unlike species across a natural barrier in a zoo, and Lane saw that the surly keeper had not known he was there. He must have come out of his house to inspect the tidal flood.

  “I’d be in my rights to just leave yo
u there,” Brone said momentarily. “You’re trespassin’, and it’s nothin’ to me whether you live or die.”

  “A touch melodramatic, don’t you think? What can harm me now?”

  “You’ve been in the grotto at high tide, by the look of you, so I’ll grant you’ve been lucky. So far.”

  The basin between them could not be more than four or five feet deep, Lane thought, and in any event he could cross in half a dozen strokes. He was more interested in how it had filled. What other avenues had he missed?

  “Luck is your stock and trade, McCabe. I’ll depend on what’s on my shoulders, thank you.” He unslung his pack, preparing to wade across.

  “Don’t move,” Brone warned.

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s somethin’ in the water.”

  “In this little canal? It was empty a while ago.”

  “And now it’s full. Bide a wee bit, I’ll get the boat.”

  “I don’t need a boat.”

  “Trust me, you do.”

  “What’s it connected to this . . . this canal?”

  “The North Atlantic.”

  “And the pond?” He looked dubiously at that black body, seeing no change in its shape or waterline.

  “Stay where you are. I’ll get the boat.”

  “Thank you, I’m touched that you suddenly care about my welfare, but dragging a boat up here is ridiculous.”

  “It’s not your welfare I care about.”

  “What then?”

  But McCabe was already dropping behind a dune in the twilight. Would it hurt to indulge him? He might get a couple of answers, if the old fart didn’t grab him by the throat as soon as he got close enough.

  McCabe reappeared, plodding heavily and rising more gradually above the dune than he had descended. He topped the crest, dragging a weathered rowboat that roared against the stones on the down side. Cautiously he launched the uncertain craft from the most graded point in the basin and, using an oar like a paddle, dipped two strokes one on either side, as if the boat were a canoe. Slowly he drifted across.

  “Get in,” he murmured, swinging broadside to the edge.

  Lane complied. “I suppose you’re worried about the Water Wolf, is that it?”

  Brone repeated his slow, shallow thrusts with the oar, one on each side, and when they had drifted to the far shore they disembarked. The Irishman gently grated the boat onto the dry apron of the grotto.

  “Look, there’s no reason we can’t be civil,” Lane said. “I’m not out to disturb anything of yours, McCabe.”

  “That’s grand. And if you ever come onto my property again, I’ll shoot you myself and bury your body outside the gate.”

  ***

  Lane toggled the replay on his audio recorder as he walked the beach back to Darrig. “. . . it must be something in the water.”

  18

  If Sosanna McCabe felt compromised going to see Lane Andersen at the cottage he had rented and she did she should have felt doubly compromised at finding him in the shower and she did not. He was such a strange man, spouting off about how unsophisticated the Irish were at that talk he had given, and now he was hollering “Come in!” right from the privy in answer to a stranger’s knock. “Oh,” was all he said when he came out wrapped in a towel, “I thought you were someone else.”

  “Believe me, I wish I was,” she said, despite the fact that she had not come here to wound him again. “Do you always invite women in without bein’ properly dressed?”

  “Matter of fact you’re the second in three days. I’m beginning to think it’s a local custom.” He disappeared into the bedroom but left the door ajar. “In the States when a strange woman comes to your door at a motel, you know what she’s there for.”

  She felt her face go up in flames, and a moment later he was back half-dressed in time to see the cinders.

  “Oh . . . I didn’t mean . . . I mean, you’re obviously not” he laughed unkindly “why are you here?”

  “I’m wonderin’ myself,” she said through gritted teeth. “Mr. Andersen ”

  “Call me Lane.”

  “Mr. Andersen, it’s come to my attention that you received a serious drubbin’ yesterday at the hands of one Flann Macloy.”

  “Drubbing? What drubbing?”

  She tried not to feel satisfied at his annoyance. “Drubbin’ or not, I heard indirectly that words were exchanged ”

  “He sucker punched me. There was no drubbing.”

  “Fine. I didn’t mean to offend your male vanity. I just wanted you to know that it had ”

  “Is that what you think, that you’ve wounded my male vanity by getting the facts screwed up?”

  “The fact is that I had nothin’ to do with it.”

  “No one said you did.”

  She felt her eyes begin to melt and her throat turn to stone. She coughed. “You’re quite impossible, Mr. Andersen, I’m really sorry I came.”

  “You and me both, lady.”

  She dropped her gaze to the carpet, blew silently through pursed lips, and tapped her right index finger on her thigh. “This as with everythin’ else with you has gone terribly wrong. Let me start again, and kindly keep quiet long enough to hear what I have to say. I’ve been told discreetly rightly or wrongly that Flann Macloy, who sometimes and erroneously thinks of himself as havin’ a relationship with me, declared that he was defendin’ my honor” she raised the tapping finger to forestall his interruption “defendin’ my honor or not, I was given that impression. And if that’s the case, or if I was mentioned as any part of the reason for your drub for Flann Macloy’s aggression, shall we say then it was purely a whim on his part. He does not act for me, speak for me, or enjoy my approval for anythin’ he does.” She folded her fingers in front of her. “Why are you grinnin’?”

  “I’m not grinning. I’m smiling. Your apology is accepted.”

  “What apology? I made no apology.”

  “Oh. Yes, your . . . explanation. I didn’t mean to offend your female vanity.”

  “Do you think I’m such a spectacle? Is that what you were grinnin’ about not that I care?”

  “It wasn’t just because of you.”

  “So you were grinnin’.”

  He made an effort to look stern, but it was difficult, standing there with his shirt half out and no socks. “It’s just the whole setup here. Your quaint little village with its desperate desire to believe in faeries. That’s what it’s all about. You’re here to defend faeries.”

  She dropped her voice, as if informing him that he had cancer. “You’re ignorant, Mr. Andersen.”

  “God help the world if it takes away your faeries.”

  “And you’re arrogant.”

  “Guilty on that charge. I may be a touch arrogant. Actually, it just looks like arrogance. It’s really impatience. My worst fault.”

  “Really? You have so many. I would have ranked it only twenty-fifth or so.”

  “Impatience at ignorance.”

  “I see. Well, ta-ta, Mr. Andersen. Don’t forget to forget me.”

  She got to the door before he said: “But I’m sorry for going on about your father the other night. That was unforgivable.”

  She turned, trying unsuccessfully to look him in the eye. He was looking at his nails. “You’re as proud as he is, you know,” she said. “The two of you, stubborn as goats, arguin’ out there.”

  “He threatened to shoot me last night.”

  “Last night?”

  “I went into that grotto next to the cemetery.” She took a step back toward him, and whether it was because he had finally captured her interest or just because he wanted to know why she was suddenly apprehensive, he began to elaborate: “I was looking for substructures. Caves, tunnels, anything that might explain that pylon in the middle of the pond. It’s got some images or maybe some characters on it. Do you know what they are?”

  She shook her head.

  “That’s what your father wouldn’t let me photograph with
a telescopic lens. Now you’re the one smiling.”

  She exhaled a laugh. “I’ve just realized that I came here today as much to spite him as to distance myself from your run-in with Flann Macloy.”

  “Spite your father, you mean?”

  She hummed a little concurrence that seemed to dissolve some of the thorniness between them.

  “May I ask . . . how old you are?” he posed suddenly.

  “Twenty-eight. Why?”

  “You just . . . I don’t know. That’s kind of old to be sparring with your father.” And as the light of battle danced back into her almond eyes, he added: “There I go again. Tactless. Look, I’m twenty-eight, and with me it’s my mother. She died hating everything I am. I believe in nothing, she believed in everything.”

  “You believe in logic.”

  “That’s true.” He looked at her with new regard. “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  He looked sheepish. She looked amused. They both looked lost.

  “You know, it’s not that I wouldn’t want there to be magic and faeries and all things beautiful,” he said softly. “To have faith in something greater than yourself, to be relieved of that onerous responsibility of knowing everything in an insecure universe, would be unfettered happiness. But that’s not the way it is.”

  “Well, you’ve just conquered arrogance anyway,” she said.

  “Maybe you can help me with ignorance.”

  “Don’t condescend with me, Mr. Andersen.”

  “Lane.”

  “All right. Lane. It could be we could help each other out, I s’pose. Not that we’re likely to see each other again. But if we do, then maybe we could discuss your theories some time. Very business-like, of course.”

  “Of course. Business-like. Much better than getting drubbed.”

  19

  “The dead have risen, Billy!” Brone cried fearfully.

  He hurried across the footbridge, squinting at the other side of the pond while Mr. Billy loped out front in a wide circle trying to understand the cause of his master’s alarm. The air hung thick with humidity. Every row of tombstones was grainier than the last, but the blue tarp was easy enough to see, lying half an arc from the sweep of graves on the southeast end.