PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “Look . . . look. It’s come! It’s here!”

  Command was gone from Brone’s step now as he moved numbly around the open grave. The dirt had been torn out of the hole in all directions, and if the Watcher saw no claw marks, he saw no evidence of tools either. But there could be no doubt that it had been a maniacal act, a feverish, furious, impassioned act. The half-ravaged cadaver had been tossed whole upon the mound on one side and twisted back and forth. Something had torn its left leg off, and the right hand was missing too. Down in the hole, which was almost oval, the coffin lid stood edge up, and the silk lining was darkly smeared with decomposition or mud.

  Brone dropped to his knees, peering anxiously to detect any unsettling of the earth beneath the coffin. The box was wood and angled out, the eight-sided kind sold by furniture stores in the late 19th century. He had dug up several of these at the erosion line near the cliff. Something had eaten through one corner of the lid. The breach might mean this one was a “safety” coffin, he decided, the missing corner having been caused by the rotting remnant of a breather tube and a rope that had been tied to the corpse’s limbs and ran to a signal flag above ground. Whether bells or flags, these grave alarms were ignored after several days, his father had told him, since bloating and putrefying caused the limbs to move anyway. By the way the coffin snugged into the dirt, he dared hope this one was otherwise intact. Wearily he rose to his feet.

  “You’ll not want to talk about this, Blair Corcoran, not if you want to minimize the damage. What with you livin’ so close by, you’ll surely not want to provoke it.”

  “Provoke it? It’s provoked, you damn fool!” Corcoran’s long face looked menacing in the mist.

  “It’s happened before. Graves desecrated and worse.”

  “Not in my time. Nor yours.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Are you tellin’ me you’ve. . . you’ve found ”

  “I’m tellin’ you to shut up about it. Think, man. Some would hear of this and want to move their family remains.”

  “You can’t blame them for that.”

  “Of course I can. You know how unlucky it is to disturb a grave.”

  Corcoran’s face rounded with uncertainty. This was true. Disturbances, accidental and otherwise, had caused hauntings, great chaos. Everyone with a family in Darrig in the 1940’s knew the story of the Demon Bride fieldstone that had been moved to widen the road to the coast. The Demon Bride was rumored to have been a jilted 18th century lover who seduced men foolish enough to linger after funerals or who came alone to mourn. And the very hour her marker was moved to make way for the road, the tenor bell in the church had begun ringing, followed by unmitigated disaster after disaster: horses dead, hens not laying, clocks stopped, dogs drowned, animals moved outside their pens without breaching the walls, and the village drunk (one of the village drunks) never seen again. The stone was put back, of course; it was back there now. And not a disturbance connected with it since.

  “But you can’t disturb graves anymore than this one’s already been disturbed,” Corcoran argued weakly.

  “Aye, but no mortal done it. Do you want to be the one to move remains?” Brone studied his neighbor sideways. “I’ll help you do it, if you want your family out, Corcoran. ‘Tis my special exemption bein’ the churchyard keeper and all. There bein’ no church, I’m sort of accorded the power, you know.”

  Brone had never before manipulated the suspicious awe with which he was regarded, but he knew it would work with Corcoran. Could it hurt to invoke the local fears that protected Thiollaney Merriu?

  “Of course, you’d have to help me move your dead, and I can’t speak to the consequences of that. It’s never come up before, but it’s probably all right.”

  “Easy for you to say . . . you’re protected.”

  “True.”

  “My Duke, he brought back a bone. Likely smelled somethin’. Found this open grave you don’t s’pose . . . ?”

  “Your dog? Not a good thing, then. You should bring the bone back and pray for forgiveness . . . and protection.”

  “Me? I dasn’t touch it. That could implicate me more.”

  Brone pursed his lips. “All right, I’ll be over today and get it myself. But if it leads to trouble . . .”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean if a lot of people come out here lookin’ to remove their dead, why, you can see how disturbin’ that would be, and there would be Hell to pay Hell. You might be held accountable by the dead, bein’ the first human in the chain of disruption, so to speak. You discovered it, and your dog has removed part of a cadaver that was enjoyin’ its eternal rest in hallowed ground.” (Not so hallowed, he thought.) “And besides, you’re convenient. Quite convenient, bein’ right across the road.”

  “See here, McCabe, you’re the Watch the keeper. I didn’t ask for this trouble, and I’m not goin’ to disturb anyone’s eternal rest, least of all my own kith and kin. The remains is in that group of trees just down from the culvert on the drive. Come get it, if you will, and leave me out of this!”

  He was already backing through the mist, and as he turned and faded away, Brone saw him cross himself in silhouette.

  “. . . and don’t tell that blabbermouth wife of yours either,” Brone murmured to himself, though he knew the hideous discovery would travel that far at the very least.

  And now it struck him just where he was whose grave it was and at that same moment he saw what Blair Corcoran had failed to see: that the second grave south of where he stood was also opened!

  Gorge rising to his throat, sweat exploding on his brow in the humid air, Brone shuffled trembling to the brink of a burial plot torn apart like the first.

  There was no corpse heaped upon the dirt. In fact, there was less dirt, because the hole narrowed as it deepened. He would have interpreted the single date on the tombstone as the date of death, but in this case it was probably the date of birth as well. Because at the bottom of the grave was a tiny coffin, still sealed at the edges though the lid had all but dissolved into a thin woody feast for damp and worms. He could see the collapsed face of the infant within. Flecked with dirt, she looked mummified in her grave dress.

  And there were two objects next to the baby that seemed to radiate in the first shafts of sunlight infusing the mist. One was a narrow tear bottle of cut glass, placed there by mourners whose outpouring of grief inside that testimonial bottle had long since dried up. The second was a traditional “empty crib” photo showing what was presumably the mother lying prostrate over a vacant cradle draped in black. There were other items within the portrait frame that he couldn’t make out, perhaps a human hair brooch and a mourning locket. He knew who the mother was, of course. She was lying on the dirt heaped up two graves away, as if reaching for her baby, and her name on the headstone was Tara. Tara Mada Burke. The girl baby was Ena Sinead Burke. And in between them, still bound within the earth but undoubtedly very much disturbed, lay the corpse Lane Andersen had pretended to visit just yesterday: Eachan Burke.

  36

  Lane drove slowly up the road at the end of the afternoon, smitten by the full magic of Connemara. The land was dark and damp but looked so vivid against the gray sky that it seemed to generate its own illumination. Deep virile greens and earthen browns rioted in fantastic tangles of roots and shivering blankets of ivy. Ancient stones rose like robed priests, their crests worn white from drenchings, their long faces marled with age and moss. A heady aroma carried from the peat fields, infused with strains from unknown flora and the compelling mystique of decay. You wanted to know what death was at hand. You had to know. There was a sun. Somewhere. The gray over the sea to the west featured an intensely white island galaxy that dripped molten orange on the horizon here and there. The wind, for once, restrained itself, and the air milled about without impetus like the currents in a vast air terminal.

  He had spent the day in useless research and in arguing with the tour guide, who had neglected to deduct his d
eposit from the scuba gear settlement, and in taking the Dream Pillow to show Doreen Brynn, and in calling his editor in New York. The only thing that added progress to the day was discovering what the word seamlas meant. It meant slaughterhouse. Abattoir.

  . . . the slaughterhouse burned down, sir . . . it was a pen . . .

  That was what the woman in the ruins had said that day the woman who had not appeared to breathe (though, of course, she must have). So Cinnfhail was exactly the horror he had concluded it was when he stood in that macabre inner chamber of skulls in the cliff: a depraved pagan cult with ghastly rites.

  Perhaps the events that had taken place at the foot of the ramp were appeasement rituals, sacrifices, or tools of control; though it seemed likely, given that the institutionalized wretches of Cinnfhail were its fodder, that it was also purification. Pity the weak and the afflicted. Good, Godly citizens would don hoods and new identities and commit primal crimes every full moon or during neap tides or on demand as warranted by cataclysms. He had stood ankle deep in the giggling remnant of their heinous acts skulls knocking together in the surges of a tide and for all his cynicism, he had been shocked again at the cruelty and corruptness of his own species.

  The dual nature of man was at the heart of his conflicts, he thought. How could he trust faith, even as an end in itself? If he were to invent God, there wouldn’t be any wavering over what the Supreme Being stood for. No random acts, no changes in universal law; a god of absolutes for all time and all places (. . . Space Almighty!). The fact that organized faith evolved instead of emerging whole and complete showed it for what it was. An invention. A contrivance. Not a path to truth but a means to cope, to try and influence outcomes and control man. And his discoveries here in Connemara had exposed that evolution at a time when it had been in rapid transition, when its contradictions had been most apparent. Obadiah Byrne’s letter of 1833 was like an SOS from the rational forces of an emerging modern society trying to escape a dark oppression: old pacts that some still adhere to . . . outdated beliefs . . . abominations.

  It wasn’t without precedence in his studies. Steeped in arcane readings, Lane Andersen could cite a score of competing beliefs caught in the act of accommodation. Like the Venustiana or the Paterniani who assigned virtue to the upper half of the body but performed every possible immorality with the lower half “the organs of Satan” giving each province its due. And what was SanterÍ a but a twisted marriage of Voodoo and Catholicism? What was any merging of faiths to accommodate two masters? But the cult in the cliff at Thiollaney Merriu was most like the Lothardi, he thought. These were fourteenth century antinomians who lived upright when they walked the earth but committed murder, sexual perversion and suicide underground where they said the rules of morality naturally lapsed, because that was the Devil’s realm.

  Maybe Thiollaney Merriu had been subtler than that. Maybe its soulless adepts considered themselves moral vigilantes. And therein could lie the source of many a tall tale in this isolated region. Who knew what atavisms motivated a people in transition from the black arts of primitivism? And how many generations did it take? There would be the enlightened few who would brave change into an age of pure reason, but there would also be those who clung rigidly to the codes of the past. There would be disasters and hard times that would send people caught in between scurrying back to their superstitious fears. Could barbaric rites have lingered that tangibly into nineteenth century rural Ireland? They could. The echoes of supernatural evil were still here today, embodied in certain lightless beings of the sidhe.

  He parked the steel-blue Fiat to the side of the road out of sight from Thiollaney Merriu so that he might sneak in unobserved. If McCabe didn’t catch him, so much the better for him to explore; and if he did well, he had the burial agreement for Eachan Burke’s grave. He also had his camera and telephoto lens, with which he would methodically map the grotto and the pond in a series of photos.

  He got out of the car and leaned back in to retrieve the camera. There he paused while he cleared the digital images. It was an old CF memory card from his last days before leaving the States, and he deleted a picture he had managed to snap of a sÉance before being tossed out, two others of a mama duck who had nested in a barrel planter on his patio and lain ten eggs, and seven murky photos that had failed to catch a single lightning flash one stormy evening. There was only one that he kept. His mother scowling at him. He had taken it self-consciously at her insistence. “Don’t you want a picture of me before I die?” . . . “Of course I do. I just didn’t know if you wanted to be remembered like this.” . . . “How else are you going to remember me?” And she made sure he remembered her scowling.

  “Are you lost?”

  He banged his head jerking out of the car.

  Sosanna McCabe had come around the only curve in the road on her way to Darrig and, seeing Lane Andersen bent over the front seat, had at once suspected the truth of his clandestine parking, had approached softly, had spoken sharply just to see him jump.

  “Little . . . little car trouble,” he murmured, resisting the impulse to rub his head.

  “They’re puttin’ the engines in the front seats now, are they?”

  “I didn’t say it was engine trouble.”

  “Oh. What is it then?”

  He stood there stricken, already feeling that the words coming out of him were like canary feathers and the sound of his voice was “meow.” It suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t driven out here just to explore Thiollaney Merriu, but that it was partly to see her Sosanna McCabe. They had begun a relationship somehow. When had it started? Was it the sketch? Women recognized these things before men did.

  “You might as well know I’m CIA,” he said. “Stands for . . . stands for . . . Completely Innocent . . . American.”

  “I see. I thought it might be Caught In the Act.”

  He breathed a laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. I’m still trying to get past your old man.”

  “He says you’ve done that. Somethin’ about visitin’ rights.”

  “Did he say what I was visiting? Or who?”

  “You didn’t look twice at the grave, he said.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t visiting a grave. Your father wouldn’t let me come to the door.”

  She regarded him with a withering keenness in her almond eyes that he successfully met. “What’s that s’pose to mean, may I ask?”

  He leaned back against the car, folded his arms. “I don’t know. It dawned on me kind of sudden.”

  “Are you sayin’ you came to see me?”

  “Well, as long as I was on the premises . . .”

  “I see. It was an afterthought.” She sauntered to the car and leaned back next to him, folding her arms exactly the same way. “I can see why you’re alone.”

  “Did I say I was alone?”

  “No. Nor did you need to. You’re alone.”

  “That’s ridiculous. It’s all I can do to keep up with . . . email.”

  “You’re alone.”

  The light continued to fall, sponging up the silence. Suddenly he blurted: “Heather’s beautiful in the twilight.”

  “I s’pose. But if you’re referrin’ to the weeds over there, it’s not heather, and we don’t call it twilight.”

  He shot her a sour sideways glance. “Did I get any of the words right?”

  “‘Beautiful.’ You said it was ‘beautiful.’ ‘Tis.” They stared in silence for a few moments, and she added: “How much longer d’you think you’ll be stayin’?”

  “Can’t say. A week, a month. I’ve got to figure out the grotto and the pond. And then there’s the road bowling. Can’t forget that.”

  “Road bowlin’?”

  “I guess it’s a sport.”

  “I know what it is. What’s it got to do with you?”

  “I’ve gotten myself into a grudge match apparently, and I don’t even know what it is. Can’t very well back out, since I did the challenging. The good news is my opponent wasn’t enthusiastic
either. I had to goad him into it.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Flann Macloy.”

  She burst out laughing, drew a knuckle to her lips.

  “Hysterical, huh?”

  “Sorry. It’s just that . . . he’s the local champion.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Still pressing her knuckle to pursed lips, she shook her head. He pushed away from the car, slid his hands in his pockets, smiled at her.

  “What are you grinnin’ at?” she demanded.

  “I’m glad I could amuse you, that’s all.” He rocked on his heels. “Maybe you want to show me how the game is played.”

  She searched his face for a double meaning. “Road bowlin’ you mean? Well. I can tell you they throw a stone down the road, and that’s more or less all there is to it. In places like Armagh and Cork they use a round shot of a certain weight, but here in our humble backwater, there’s just a round stone kept at Buskers.” She was still searching his face.

  “What’s the object?”

  “The object? The object is to go the distance.”

  “Ah, the distance. That would be . . . ?

  “Forever, if you’re capable of it.”

  “Nothing goes forever.”

  “Around here, we still try for forever.”

  “‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ Tennyson.”

  “Browning. And that’s the trouble with men, they’re all for graspin’ without securin’ the reach. Especially Yanks. Especially Yanks on holiday.”

  “I’m not on holiday.”

  “Well, you’ve picked the wrong game. Maybe you should sit this one out.”

  “Too late.” He avoided her eyes. “Just my luck to land in a village with no diversions except throwing rocks down a road.”

  “Who says it’s our only diversion?”

  “What else is there?”

  “Well . . . there’s road dancin’.”

  “Don’t tell me . . . you dance in the road.”

  “Beggin’ your pardon, but after we didn’t build the forty lane indoor bowlin’ alley, we also didn’t build a fancy discothÈque. Of course, there’s Buskers on weekends, if you prefer that atmosphere which apparently you do.”