At the Futon he stopped backing up. “What are you talking about?”
She turned her head as if to disdain his innocence and uttered a short disparaging laugh. “A little late for play-actin’, I should think. What kind of fool do you take me for? Is it just the victory for you?”
“Hold it, hold it wasn’t I just talking to your twin sister a little while ago . . . the heavenly one? I don’t believe in mind-reading. Why don’t you give me a hint?”
She studied him as if his pretense were a thing of wonder. “It’s absolutely clear what happened, Lane Andersen. Your stone tablets are there just the way you wanted to put them, and the water is gone, and you had them not two hours ago.”
“The steles? I’ve still got them.”
“So these are duplicates, are they? Facin’ in just the way you said they had to be. Did you tell someone else about that?” She gave him barely a second. “I didn’t think so. Not that it could matter. You had them, and now for a certainty I know where they are. And where we are.”
“Trust me, I’ve still got them.”
“Trust you, when I’ve seen with my own eyes?”
“I thought you were big on trust.”
“I was, but you’re fast convertin’ me to faithlessness.”
“This is absurd ”
“It is that. You saw my father wasn’t there, and you seized the opportunity. Tell me, if I’d come flyin’ out of the house, would you have stopped?”
He was speechless, and she straightened with grim satisfaction, as if she had come here for just that reaction. She was out the door, taking three strides for his every two, and rapidly disappearing up the road, leaving him gesturing with one palm in the air ten feet from the stoop.
Self-preservation made a rush at his thoughts I told you so, dummy, Freud had it right after all but anger and cynicism collapsed into emptiness and ache. How could she seem so certain about something that was impossible? And what did she mean, the water is gone? Was this some pernicious after-symptom of the Dream Pillow, like her mother’s digging up a grave in the middle of the night?
He moved slowly back into the cottage, dropped down on the middle of the futon, pawed his face and leaned on his knees. As an afterthought he rose up again, went out to the car and unlocked the door to get at the nylon overnight bag. He reached across the seat to the grips and yanked with enough force to lift the stone steles, but of course the bag shot up in the air. He dropped it as if it were hot. Coupled with Sosanna’s assertion of where the steles were, there was no need to check where they were not. Distraught, and thinking she could not be very far ahead, he hurried after her on foot.
49
Una went to the most desolate part of the shore above the grotto as soon as Brone left for Muldeen to buy floodlights and cable. He had already dragged the generator down to the pond, and so she knew he was serious about lighting the Pillar at night as he had often said he should do. She would have two hours at least.
The shore was actually a ragged deadfall of half submerged forest and stone outcroppings so thick that no one would think of trying to pass through. This debris field extended into the sea bottom where numberless hazards kept boats at bay. When the tidal surge was heavy it was particularly lethal, but the one thing it offered was isolation. The surge was heavy today.
She made her way through the deadfall like a sea otter, diving, surfacing, twisting, winding over and under impossible barriers. The water was like a second skin, conveying nerve impulses that told her exactly where everything was and how it was moving. She could have negotiated her way through in the dark, she thought, simply by the gradation of taste from thick brackishness to the full palate of the ocean and by the fulsome array of scents. How she loved the brininess, the constant metabolism of life from death, the hints of drama in blood and decay.
The tempo was always to be obeyed. There were majestic days when the waves rolled in as uniformly as a promenade. You gave each one its due, knowing how far it had traveled. Unspoken were the orchestrations of moon and wind and thermal events. Other days brought urgency, as when the swells were driven by cataclysms in the bowels of the earth. Monstrous displacements sent transverse signals, and all living denizens picked up the new resonance, becoming edgy, darting, while the larger predators went quite mad. And that was happening today too. It was a danger Una felt drawn to examine, as if she had stepped outside the house to get The Connacht Tribune and learn the latest news in Galway County.
Living on the earth seemed increasingly sterile and two-dimensional to her. Down here in the sea the senses reapportioned themselves. Her skin became exquisitely sensitive and vibrations came to her like pictures. Pictures with emotions implicit in them. You felt the movements of other living things from every quarter around you. Visual acuity was less important; sound was muted yet carried further. Blue whales communicated across oceans, and even the magnetic poles discharged their voices. The sea was a sounding board for the earth.
The deadfall went deeper and deeper beneath the sea, and she dove down until brachiated forms embraced her, their reedy arms spread wide in eternal welcome. Smooth gray shapes ghosted away from her like flotillas of spacecraft in an inky void. She was part of the order, and they deferred. Somewhere there were shapes that wouldn’t move away from her that she would have to flee but for an unfettered hour or more she dove and swam and surfaced, and it wasn’t until she felt the shift that time returned.
The shift.
It wasn’t a current, a surge or a tide. It was a genuine shift. It came from the earth. From inland. The vascular earth had sustained an event, and she had felt it out here in the sea as she would not have on land.
She surfaced, saw nothing beyond the shattered half-sunken trees of the deadfall. Pulling herself under again in a series of long undulating strokes, she navigated the rotted stumps. When she was through them, she retrieved her cotton shift and wriggled into it, then continued toward the house. And that was when she saw her husband’s truck.
He had left the door open and she closed it as she passed, wondering if he had had his arms full or had rushed inside for some reason. She hoped she wasn’t the reason. Floodlights and cable were still in the truck bed, so something must have distracted him. The shift. He had felt it too.
The front door was open, and she heard her name called just before his footsteps hammered down the staircase.
“Holy mother of God, what’s happened?” he cried frenziedly when he saw her. He took her in his rough grip and his eyes were bulging. “We’re you here? Did you see?”
She moved past him into the house. “See what?”
He grabbed the jamb, swung his other arm extravagantly. “Look . . . look, woman. D’you see the pond? No! It’s gone! Gone where, I’m askin’ you.”
She stood looking at the parlor wall, listening. It was as if she were still in the murky depths of the sea, searching out vibrations.
“Where’s Sosi?” he demanded and immediately strode back to the stairs. “Sosanna!” Up the stairs like a jackhammer. “Sosanna?” Her door opening and closing with a slam. Down again. “God help me, where can she be?”
Una sagged at the table, her sea-green eyes unblinking.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“They’re comin’,” she said. “Not just the restless.”
“Who?”
“They’re marchin’.”
“The dead?”
“More of them than I’ve ever heard before.”
50
Brone looked out, but what he saw were his daughter and the Yank marching if you could call it that ankle deep in the mud of the pond basin. Was that what Una was referring to? They were arguing, he could tell from the house, and it was that, the resolute swing of Sosanna’s arms, the high-kneed determination of the Yank to catch up to her, which made him hope Una had meant them.
He started out to meet them at a walk but had taken no more than three brisk steps before he saw Lane Andersen change objectives. From the h
igher ground this side of the bridge he could see part of the basin, and there was his daughter, gesturing in argumentation, still rooted at a point perhaps halfway down the descent, and there was Andersen almost out of sight, heading toward the base of the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu!
Brone ran and shouted, but by the time his heavy boots thundered across the planking of the footbridge he had to conserve his breath. He had lost sight of the Yank entirely, and as he reached the rows of sunken graves, he no longer saw Sosanna. His great lumbering strides ate up precious seconds, yet he dared hope he would be in time. He had to be on time! He would throw himself at Andersen as he had at strikers on the pitch in his youth, and then he would choke him. If he could get his hands on the bloody trespasser, nothing would unbend his fingers. To his dismay it was Lane Andersen who reappeared first, rising above his daughter, because he was already climbing the footings.
“Stop!” Brone boomed ineffectually. “Don’t touch it!”
His eyes fell immediately on the transformation at the apex of the Pillar. Another of the stone tablets abutted at an angle to the first and he guessed there was now a third in place on the other facing. This must be why the pond had drained. How could he have believed the meddling intruder’s promise to stay off the pond? And then he reached a point half a dozen strides from the edge, and the full exposure hit him.
In the living memory of the McCabes it had always been untrespassed black water. No one had fished or swam or otherwise plumbed its depths, except when they dragged the pond looking for Una’s body the day he had drowned. (Wasn’t it little Beatris Cassidy lying buried over yonder, her blood drained by leeches? And if he himself had stretched that cautionary tale a bit to discourage his daughter from wading in the pond, hadn’t he also lost Mr. Billy before his very eyes to the denizen of Thiollaney Merriu?) The pond was consecrated to the dead, it was said, though the elders in Darrig had always hinted there were other reasons to leave it undisturbed. Una had been the first to say there were structures down here. Weedy walls, she had said. Labyrinths and titanic things. And now in the drained basin he saw for himself what looked like a colossal marzipan faerie kingdom choked with red and green and yellow algae and reedy tresses, raying out around the Pillar like rainbow confections.
You could almost believe it was a fantastic natural erosion. Encrustations and banks of milfoil and what he feared were several coffins lodged at oblique angles in certain crevices gave it a random appearance. But other rows of hollows must surely be windows, and the nearly shapeless hulks crouching at regular intervals around the perimeter had all the suggestion of feral beings with membraned wings. And most fearsome of all were the countless nondescript lumps, any one of which might turn out to be a certain canvas sea bag whose contents he ached not to rediscover. There were other grotesqueries Brone McCabe had no time to identify, because he knew that despite the scale of what he saw, he was seeing only the upper ramparts of an edifice too gargantuan to contemplate. And there was the solemn spire of the Satan church, the Pillar itself, like a blasphemous finger sticking up in an alien land formed by God, probing, sensing, waiting, capable of resurrecting what was below at the fateful hour.
“Andersen!” he bellowed with all his might but earned only a glance.
The American had scaled the raw stone of the steeple, taking advantage of mossy crenellations that rose up each of its edges like bony plates on saurian spines. He had reached the part that had formerly stuck out of the water.
“Andersen!” Brone bellowed again and pitched forward through the mud. “Don’t do it . . . in the name of God, get away . . . come down!”
Sosanna took a step forward, confused, frightened, and angry at the two men who had caused the most consternation in her life. She didn’t know what these fabulous traces at the bottom of the pond were: the archeological ruin Lane Andersen was seeking; the holy of holies her terrified father had guarded all her life; her mother’s vision of a castle world; all three. “I’m going to fix it!” Lane Andersen hollered down as he reached the pinnacle, and she hoped mightily that for once his ill-advised bravado would bear fruit.
“You can’t do any good,” Brone huffed in an oddly baritone voice. “Leave it . . . come down.”
Lane hung from the crest of the Pillar, his right hand feeling along one edge of the Peruvian stele. He tugged to the side and a fraction of give rewarded him. Spidering his fingers for purchase in the seam he had created, he tugged again, and this time there was a grating sound. He squeezed his fingertips under the lifted edge and pulled the stele straight out. A glance at the basin reassured him that nothing had yet happened.
He really hadn’t expected anything. Someone had stolen his two contraband treasures, had known to place them on the pylon, had somehow caused the pond to empty. Where and how he hadn’t a clue. Since the ocean fed the pond in some elaborate way through the grotto, it didn’t seem mechanically possible that it could have backflowed. But in any event, he had to return the pylon to its original state, even though he wanted more than anything to examine the phenomenon that had been exposed. Almost more than anything. There seemed to be no way to mollify Sosanna except to undo the deed she thought had motivated him to betray her.
So. The second stele.
“You swore you wouldn’t go on the pond!” Brone cried.
Lane looked out at the empty expanse. “What pond is that?” He noted now that there were similarities between this colossus whose outlines stretched below him, and the roof of Cinnfhail. As if the latter might have been a mere miniature shrine to what was here at Thiollaney Merriu. Too bad he didn’t have time to be sure, he thought ruefully. Any delay would make it clear to Sosanna that he was trying to have his cake and eat it too.
The second stele.
His right wrist hooked around the Pillar, the fingers of that hand gripping the freed stele. With his left he began to probe for the seam of the Egyptian stone. Something unrelated clattered below him, and he heard Sosanna’s voice crosscutting her father’s. There. He had it. Gently rocking . . . one more tug. A moment later he felt the movement of air close by his left cheek. The bastard was throwing stones at him.
But out came the stele!
He nearly lost his balance this time, revolving away from his perch, right wrist rubbed raw on the Pillar. The grate of stone on stone when he caught himself was amplified in his adrenaline-honed senses, seeming to blend with the roar of a cataract. The Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu had returned to its status quo, and the pond was re-filling! But a moment later he was recovered, and it was silent. Nothing had happened.
No cataract. No incoming deluge. Nothing.
He looked down, saw relief in McCabe’s face, consternation on Sosanna’s. It occurred to him now that if the pond had suddenly flooded, they would have been caught in it. What had made him think the enormous extravagance of three global sites linked by complexities beyond guessing could be simply manipulated? Disappointed, he started down, and that was when the ledge of stone that marked the old waterline on one side of the Pillar of Thiollaney began to collapse.
There was, perhaps, sixty feet of escarpment below that point and it was all sliding toward the bottom of the basin. The exact height was uncertain because a virtual moat of black water remained at the footings. Lane had skirted it on outcroppings at its narrowest point and used the mossy stone ridges that rose like dragons’ spines in order to scale the Pillar. But now the caked sediment of centuries fell away, revealing not the three edges of an extended pylon but a base of four massive pilings that would have formed an obelisk had the space between them been filled with something other than mud and stone. Tons of loose debris cascaded into the moat below, sending up a bulge of water that sluiced toward dark crevices across a sloped apron of overlapped tiles.
Still clinging to the scaffold of stone and staring down now through the arches of a glistening carved obelisk rooted in unknown depths, Lane saw that neither Sosanna nor her father were endangered. In fact they were riveted on something. He
saw McCabe stiffen and Sosanna’s hands fly to her mouth as though to suppress a scream. And then he saw the thing that the sluicing water left, flopping slowly across the tiles toward the dark crevices.
It was Flann Macloy. Or at least the upper half of Flann Macloy, his white face serene, the wonderfully rich black hair still as tempest-tossed as Beethoven’s, his eyelids open if completely dark within. The arms seemed to be animated, bending and pushing in the wash that drew the half-corpse inexorably (and mercifully for the watchers) through the venting crevices at the bottom of the slope.
The living stared disbelieving at the point of Flann Macloy’s termination on earth, and when they moved it was like sleepwalkers coming awake. Brone moved consolingly toward his daughter, who raised a hand in warning that she didn’t want to be touched. Lane descended slowly and awkwardly. When he reached the bottom, he came the rest of the way with a stele in each arm like Moses bearing the Ten Commandments.
“He must have fallen after he put the steles in place on the Pillar. He must have been . . . crushed by rocks.”
At sound of Lane’s voice, Brone reanimated. “Did you not see the marks?” he said caustically, a vein pulsing in his neck. “He was torn apart by the Water Wolf. You have no idea what you’ve begun.”
“I undid what he changed. I thought it might ”
“What you’ve done, Andersen, is stirred the bowels of Hell.”
“With all due respect, sir, that’s nonsense.”
Sosanna jerked away from the tiled slope and glared at him, and in that instant Lane saw that nothing he could offer now would persuade her from old beliefs. She began to make her way ponderously up the slope.
“If I could put the water back and leave Ireland, I would,” Lane said.
“In the name of God, don’t let failure on the first part spoil success on the second,” Brone McCabe replied.
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