PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  The tarp he had used yesterday to cover the freshly dug grave that he had not yet sodded had been deliberately moved, therefore someone must have seen what was under it. Someone knew a coffin had been disturbed. He looked to the gate, but it was closed and he could discern no tracks in the mud left by the night’s rain. It had to be the rowdy delinquents from the village, or someone with suspicions that he had been moving graves. And then he saw the freshly turned earth rounded over the plot just as he had left it. Was it likely that anyone out to make trouble for him would have done no probing into a fresh grave?

  “Thank God, Billy,” he wheezed, “it must have been the wind moved the tarp.”

  Mr. Billy stood at the edge of the plot, ears pricked, cocking his head at his master who leaned forward with his arms braced against his knees.

  But could the wind have carried the tarp off when he had weighted it with a shovel? And where was the shovel? He had wanted to let the grave settle overnight before sodding, so now he set to work leveling and raking, talking to the dog.

  “Not enough I’ve got to patch and clean marble, carve stones, mow, and argue with the likes of the historical society over old markers, Billy. Now the sea itself is takin’ its bite out of us. We’ll all float away to Tir na n-Og along with the buried, we will. And the county always threatenin’ to take away my stipend. If they knew what they was payin’ me for, they’d fetch up a ransom or two and drop to their knees in gratitude, Billy.”

  He unrolled the sod he had taken up, four strips, pieced in as seamlessly as the inlaid gold filigree on the Ardagh Chalice. It was a grave that would never be missed, being one of the old section, and hadn’t he always done right by the dead? He had a thought to leave a field stone marker, like the ones from the old days, just in case he had to know where it was in order to dig around it. Because there were going to be others. The omnivorous sea had its tidal fingers stuck in all the crannies, and it was going to reap a harvest, despite his denial of that very fact to Una. He would have to stay ahead of it.

  When the fieldstone was in place and he was satisfied with the sod over the grave and its inscrutability, he stood back.

  “‘Dead men rise up never,’ Billy. That’s Swinburne, in case you’re not up on your poetry.” Keeping an eye out for the shovel, he moved on to pick up the blue tarp. “Whadya think, Billy, was there a westerly wind we missed last night? I’m likin’ to think we’re both gettin’ old. Or rather not likin’ to think.”

  He stooped and snagged the tarp, but when he lifted the end to snap it clean, he froze. Because there was something under it. Another grave, of course. And this one was yawning wide open.

  ***

  “Are you sure you didn’t find it and cover it with the tarp, Una? You’ve been wanderin’ a lot lately, forgettin’ afterwards.”

  “If I forgot, I can tell you no different then, can I?”

  “I’d put it to them criminal kids and their vandalism, but it wasn’t clear it was dug with a shovel. Somethin’ was clawin’ all around the coffin.”

  “And inside? Did it get inside?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You didn’t look?”

  “It was still sealed.”

  “You should have looked. What about tracks?”

  “I couldn’t tell. Mr. Billy was runnin’ all around. Lots of paw prints, but I think they was his . . . .”

  20

  Mad Darby . . . he’ll lead you out of danger, if you look for his light.

  Lane got the left turns and the right turns all correct on the first try but almost missed Abban’s cottage through the gray rain. Set back among the oaks as it was, the trail in seemed almost to invent itself as he rolled slowly through the bower of trees. He could hear acorns crackling under the tires of the Fiat Punto, and the exotic scent of captive flowers stole through the dash vents despite the dampness. His knock on the narrow cottage door seemed no more substantial than the gloomy trail, as if the stucco front were just a façade, but the spry old man had it open with barely a wait, and the fuzzy margins of yesterday’s impressions sharpened into reality.

  “Hello, Abban. Mad Darby sends his regards.”

  “Begorra, you’ve gone to the grotto, and none the worse for it. Come in, come in.”

  The wizened face was all whorls when Abban smiled. Lane followed him through a maze of garish bric-a-brac to a pair of deal chairs on either side of a checkerboard the only two possible seats in the parlor, as if Abban took interlocutors by appointment, one at a time. The smell of ginger underlay the smell of alcohol.

  “Draughts?” the old man purred, but he was already making the first move, having claimed the red.

  Lane countered symmetrically, understanding that the game was the price of conversation. “How did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “About the grotto, and that business with the light. You knew I’d get trapped in those channels.”

  “Channels is it? Well, you didn’t get very far.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your move.”

  Lane glanced at the board, moved a black checker. “What do you mean I didn’t get very far?”

  “Oh, the grotto goes under everythin’ everythin’ but Mag Mell.”

  “Under the cemetery?”

  “Under all churchyards. Your move.”

  Lane slid another checker without taking his eyes from the pug face. “Mag Mell. That would be the Irish version of heaven on an island.”

  There was the snap of a jump executed with glee. “You’re not very good at draughts, are you?”

  Lane looked at the board, made a move, was triple-jumped.

  “King me,” Abban said.

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t just tell me what the grotto was like. Why don’t you tell me everything you know about Thiollaney Merriu?”

  The whorls of Abban’s face went smooth and his squint lost its tension, as if to make blank his very soul. “Tell you everythin’ I know? Have you got a century or two? Easier to tell what I don’t know. I don’t know the grotto havin’ too much sense to have ever gone in there. As for Thiollaney Merriu as a whole, ‘tis the lair of the Water Wolf, plain and simple.”

  “That again.”

  Abban studied the board between them, and his voice was suddenly remote and casual. “You see why it’s no use tryin’ to tell you about Thiollaney Merriu. In the end it will be whatever fate and circumstances put in your way. Maybe nothin’. Maybe a

  one-way ticket to pandemonium in the heavenly spheres.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Bullshit is it?”

  Lane started to move a checker out of turn and received an admonishing finger wagged under his nose. When he looked up, Abban had a clay pipe between his teeth that must have been sitting nearby. A couple of thoughtful draws and the ginger smell intensified.

  “Oh, I s’pose the safest way for you to approach Thiollaney Merriu is to use what’s at hand, Mr. Andersen. I’m thinkin’ your Dream Pillow is at hand. That way you’ve got more control. Not a lot, of course, but ”

  “Amazing. You’re so indiscriminately superstitious.”

  “Eh?”

  “Do all Irish priests have a rosary in one hand and a four leaf clover in the other?”

  “Just the wise ones. ‘Twas you told half the village that religion is nothin’ but spells and charms, was it not?”

  “I don’t recall the Book of Leprechauns being in the Bible.”

  Abban took two draws on his dudeen pipe and rocked in a chair without rockers. “This is why you need the Dream Pillow. There’s no tellin’ you water is wet till you drown; no tellin’ you you’ve stepped off a cliff till you’re dashed on the rocks. You don’t have enough faith to be a doubter. Not a breath of flexibility. You might need that pillow of yours to soften the landing. Take it or leave it.”

  “That’s your advice?”

  “No. My advice is to stay away from Thiollaney Merriu. I thought we was pas
t that.”

  Lane “drummed” his fingers silently on his thigh. “First there’s fear, then there’s faith. That’s how myths and I include religion have always been sold. Isn’t there a way to access whatever is on that site without running the booby traps and special effects?”

  “Well, there’s the usual way.” And the clay pipe fired dots and dashes of smoke, as if encoding amusement.

  “You mean being buried in the churchyard?”

  Abban stopped drawing on the dudeen, cleared his throat. “A bad joke. But that’s always been my weakness. I’ll give you this, and know that if you follow what I say, it’s of your own free will and not through anyone else’s mischief. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Then it just may be that a man of reason such as yourself, after puttin’ aside his unreasonable fears of a harmless pillow, could wake up in the mornin’ to the Mists of Ionarbadh. And if that be the case, then before you speak to another human bein’, you must go the edge of the cliff at Thiollaney Merriu and look over the edge. But remember, it’s of your own free will, and I didna trick ya.”

  “What’s over the edge, Abban?” Lane asked, trying not to look bored.

  “I dunno. Could be the faolchÚ hisself.”

  “The what?”

  “The Water Wolf. Or his minions.”

  “. . . a pack of faeries.”

  “Oh, the faeries have nothin’ to do with the Water Wolf, you can be sure of that. And one more thing, if you hear the sound, you must get out, if you can. Leave. Flee.”

  “What sound?”

  “You’ll know if you hear it.”

  “Like the tide?”

  “Not the tide.” The old face sobered. “Marchin’ . . .”

  21

  Sosanna had been on the pond at Thiollaney Merriu in a boat only once before, when she was seven, and just as now, it was without her father’s knowledge.

  “Why can’t I fish?” she had asked then.

  “Because the pond belongs to the dead,” she had been told.

  “Do the dead eat all the fish?”

  “No,” her mother had said. “There are no fish in Thiollaney Merriu.”

  “Are there frogs?”

  “No.”

  “Are there turtles?”

  “No.”

  “Uh-huhh,” Sosanna had contradicted. “I saw a turtle.”

  And that had led to the search. Her mother had seemed not so much interested in the turtle as the fact that Sosanna maintained she had seen it under the water under the black surface of Thiollaney Merriu. Together they had dragged the old dory down into the shallows and climbed in as if they were stepping on ice. Out they went, her mother rowing slowly, bidding her daughter look down in the water and watching her. And that was when Sosanna had first learned about the castles.

  “What do you see, Sosi? Do you see the green walls?”

  She had wanted to. She thought she almost did. Walls undulating as if they burned with green fire, parting now and then to reveal the black and violet things below. Did she see the stone figures crouching? And the giant arches? Did she see . . . eyes? Sometimes the very young could see things adults could not, her mother had said. It was a power that came from the realm before birth and waned among mortals on the earth.

  Sosanna had only seen her own reflection. “Why is the water like a mirror?” she had asked.

  And her mother, pulling slowly on one oar, had rowed them away from the Pillar back toward the edge of the pond. “Because you’re so fair, my dearest one,” she had said. “Everythin’ wants to possess your beauty. Even the pond of Thiollaney Merriu.”

  So now she was here again. The boat was still old, though a different one than the dory of two decades ago, and this time it was she who pulled the oars. She pulled them slowly, as her mother had done, as if to keep them from splashing and scaring the fish that were not there. Why had her mother rowed so carefully?

  A dragonfly sliced up the sky, stopping abruptly in mid-air near the Pillar, and Sosanna remembered the butterfly that had perhaps landed on her wrist and then on the Pillar. She had a sketchpad and a 4H pencil with her. Lane Andersen had aroused her curiosity about the tablet, and she thought she would make a copy and study it. It wasn’t for him, of course for Lane Andersen but for herself. Curiosity was all he would arouse in her, she resolved, even if he was the first eligible male to come to the village in a while. That glint in Doreen Brynn’s eyes was unmistakable. Whether or not the American knew it, he wouldn’t have to stay in Darrig very long before he found opportunities among the women. But she wouldn’t be one of the flighty ones who threw themselves at every new man to come along. If she was out here to look at the Pillar, it had nothing to do with their incidental contact. It was because she had her own questions to answer, things that struck at the heart of what she had always trusted. He had drawn her attention to it, yes, and she gave him his due for a rational approach, but she wanted to see for herself why it was such an issue with her father.

  The ragged rock upon which the Pillar stood was tiny and in one spot the boat actually put in close enough to touch it. If she could reach high enough to hold the paper over the tablet, she could shade an exact impression with the pencil, she thought. So she maneuvered the hull dead opposite and, steadying herself on one of its three coarse facings with her left hand, cautiously stood and twisted her torso, feet spread to either side of the keel.

  The stone had a grit to it rougher than sandstone and very dry. She had once touched a shark some fishermen had brought in at Clifden, and it reminded her of that. When she found her balance, she reached up with a sheet of paper she had torn loose from the pad, but the stone tablet remained out of reach.

  Too close to give up, she thought. Onto the balls of her feet, she rose, sensing the slipperiness between the hull and the water as the boat rocked slightly. But as soon as she moved her fingers the boat shot back so violently that she had to lean sharply forward to catch herself. Her weight was now shifted to a point outside the gunwale, and with her knees stiffened to keep the boat near, she embraced the Pillar. Classic comedy: the fisherman stretched between boat and dock, about to take the plunge. Unless you couldn’t swim.

  Her calves were already cramping and the boat jiggled, seeming to add its collusion against her. She pulled hard to draw the craft closer. Then she lowered her center of gravity and hand-walked down to the base of the Pillar. Shaking from the effort, she plunked into half an inch of water sloshing under the seats.

  Somehow she had managed to hold onto the pencil, though the loose page was turning gold as it curled just under the surface of the pond. A raft of bubbles rose around it. With all the rocking she supposed air had been trapped under the paper or under the boat. Retrieving the sketchpad from the seat and hoisting herself in its place, she began a free-hand rendering.

  If she had thought at all about the Pillar when she stood on the edge of the pond as a little girl, she had assumed it was part of the original churchyard, or even that her father had carved it as he did many of the headstones. Now she could see that it had irregular shapes on it, perhaps a map, and some writing in an unfamiliar alphabet. She had to keep turning her head to study it and to use the oars as the boat drifted; but suddenly an odd thing happened.

  The hull shuddered and simply stopped.

  She leaned, rocked. The boat was stable. Twisting, she surveyed the opaque blackness in a slow circle.

  Why is the water like a mirror, mother?

  Because you’re so fair, my dearest one . . . everythin’ wants to possess your beauty.

  The boat was grounded. No question at all about that. The water was too black to reveal the cause. She probed with an oar and found nothing, but it could be caught on a stump or a snag. Good. She wouldn’t disturb it till she was done sketching.

  The marks on the tablet had no relevance for her. She had seen many kinds of runes in books about Ireland and no end to the mystic symbols that ranged from carven High Crosses to solitary mo
ssy stones in leprous bogs, proclaiming their single silent shibboleth, but the thing on the Pillar was unique. And the more she studied it, the more it seemed to scream at her. As if some arcane history were using the pond as a sounding board and vibrating there. She wanted urgently to grasp it, because she knew that the critical epiphanies of her life happened to her at odd moments, even on sunny days afloat on a dusty black pond with dragonflies dividing the sky.

  The effort to connect made her suddenly feel the way she had felt running along the cliff as a little girl, releasing white feathers in the updrafts so that they would return to the birds. The euphoria lasted several minutes, long enough for the sketch to be completed, and stopped when she felt or imagined she felt three distinct thrums on the bottom of the boat. The hull had freed itself.

  And indeed the boat began to rotate. It rotated slowly, but a little faster than she might have supposed it could in the stagnant pond. A dragonfly buzzed her with its redundant wings, zigzagging out of all perspective with the laws of flight. And the boat, that too was accelerating out of all proportion with natural law. Because it was spinning wildly now. Truly spinning. Like a needle afloat in soapy water. First this way, then that . . . then, finally, all in one direction. Around and around, faster and faster it rotated until she dropped her sketchpad and grabbed the gunwales.

  No feathering of oars would matter now; she splashed and slapped the surface of the water in an attempt to gain control. It flashed through her mind that a whirlpool was forming, though the hull dipped and lifted as if impaled, causing her strokes to skip and plunge. Desperate, she dug both oars deep and hauled back as hard as she could. The boat shuddered for a few feet as if dragging an anchor along an uneven bottom and was freed.

  She wasted no time getting to the reeds on the southwest side. A dozen frantic strokes and she was scrambling over the bow. Feet plunging, cold mud sucking at her ankles, she dragged the boat until it grated to a stop. Then she turned and, in a series of short backward retreats, hauled the craft high and dry.