The Pandora Room: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  Dunlap took a step away from her. “I wasn’t suggesting ghosts.”

  Beyza smiled behind her mask. “If you start seeing things, do let me know.”

  She tore herself away from the wall and the vent and continued through the maze of smaller, more claustrophobic rooms. Less than a minute later, they found themselves at the top of what she’d always thought of as the back stairs. When she swung her flashlight beam back and forth, she saw that the strings of lights still hung there, but then she remembered they were no longer connected to the generator.

  Quietly, she swore.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she insisted and started down.

  “Anyone ever tell you that your communication skills leave a lot to be desired? Or do you just not like me?”

  Beyza glanced back at him, flinching when Dunlap lifted his flashlight. “I don’t know you. But I’m uncomfortable around guns and have had little reason to trust American soldiers in my life. So you’ll forgive me if I focus on finding Martin?”

  “Guess there’s no arguing with that,” the sergeant replied.

  Beyza started down. This was the longest continuous staircase in Derveyî, a lazy spiral of seventy-two steps that led to the deepest part of the subterranean city, including the space they believed had been used for grain storage, as well as the main kitchen for the entire population.

  The whistle of the wind through the vents seemed to have grown louder. For a moment, she could hear Dunlap’s footsteps on the stairs behind her, but not her own. She felt outside of herself somehow, and then her heartbeat grew louder and she heard the scuff of her footfalls. For a moment she was light-headed, and her clothes clung to her, her body sheened with perspiration despite the chill.

  Her flashlight wavered from the trembling of her hand, and then she lowered it, leaning against the staircase wall.

  “Professor?” Dunlap said, jostling up beside her, braced to catch her if she collapsed.

  In the moment before she would have replied, she heard someone else speaking. The voice came from below her, around the curving of the spiral stairs, a laughing whisper.

  “So easy,” the voice said. “No hesitation. The lion or the lamb, that’s the question. Always the question.”

  The whisper became a quiet chuckle, and something about it made her realize she knew that voice. Exhausted as she was, in the darkness, with all the talk about ghosts, she had been quick to let fear creep in, but now she knew better.

  Beyza hurried down the stairs, once around the spiral and halfway again, and then her flashlight found the figure seated on the steps with his back to her. Martin’s filtration mask hung uselessly around his throat. She thought about Cortez back in her room, about him removing her mask and everything that came afterward, and found she could not chide Martin for a foolishness she shared.

  She crouched beside him, trying to work his mask back into place.

  “You have to put this back on, Martin. I’ll help—”

  Martin grabbed her wrist tightly enough so that the bones hurt. She began to wrest herself free, but he only shoved her arm away. Beyza leaned against the opposite wall.

  “Put it on, Martin,” Dunlap said above them, shining his own flashlight down on them, casting strange shadows and too bright a light.

  “Lion or the lamb,” Martin replied, shaking his head.

  When he turned, Beyza saw that he held a stone shard in his hands. He’d been cradling it, and now he reached out to her and grabbed her wrist again. He yanked her close, and he raised the stone. Her flashlight fell out of her grasp and tumbled down several steps, the lens cracking though the light continued to shine.

  Dunlap shouted at him, raised his gun, and took aim.

  Beyza roared one word. “No!” But she wasn’t sure which one the word had been meant for.

  Martin hesitated, then tossed the stone down the stairs, where it ricocheted off the turn in the spiral and bounced out of sight.

  The drafty vents moaned.

  Beyza wished herself into the arms of her mother or the wine-soaked company of her dearest friends, or even back in her quarters with Cortez. Even being home with her dreadful husband would have been better than this. Instead, she remained there on the stairs, for her wishes had never had much power.

  Again, she said his name. Again, she lifted the mask and tried to put it on him.

  “Let me help you,” she said, too many questions in her head. All she knew in that moment was that Martin had been broken.

  “What’s the point?” he said quietly. He turned toward her, and in the light from Dunlap’s flashlight, she saw the first blemishes beneath his jaw, dark spots that would become lesions.

  “Oh, Martin,” she said.

  He shrugged. “No point at all, Bey. We’re never getting out of here.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Taejon could barely keep his eyes open. He leaned against the wall at the top of the steps leading down to the Pandora Room, weapon cradled across his chest. Private Carson had jumped up and down quite a bit, trying to wake himself up, whining a lot because nobody had told them how much longer they would be on duty before someone would relieve them and they could get some sleep. Taejon figured it must be past two in the morning by now, hopefully even later.

  “No reason we both need to be standing,” Carson said. “Maybe we take turns. If I could lie down on the floor for twenty minutes, that’d be enough.”

  Taejon glanced at him. “You’re gonna be able to sleep with that mask on, lying on a stone floor?”

  Carson laughed. “Brother, I can sleep any damn place. Comes to it, I could sleep standing up, but I don’t want to start snoring and piss you off.”

  “A person can’t sleep standing up.”

  “Cows do it,” Carson said. “Seen ’em on my family’s farm a million times. As kids we’d go over to the neighbors’ farms and sneak up behind the cows and tip ’em over while they’re sleeping.”

  “That strikes me as pretty mean,” Taejon said.

  Carson cocked his head. “They’re cows, Tay. They’re dumb as shit.”

  Taejon kept his own counsel. If cows could sleep on their feet because they were so stupid, he figured Carson might be able to sleep standing up after all. If dumb was all it took, the guy had the credentials for it.

  “You want to lie down, go on and do it,” Taejon said.

  “You outrank me, Corporal, so if you’re ordering me to lie down, I might just do that.”

  The only emotion Taejon felt at this pronouncement was envy. If Carson wanted to close his eyes for twenty minutes, he didn’t see the harm, but no way would he risk it himself. He might only be a corporal, but Carson had been right—he had rank down here. And someone had to stay awake and pay attention with all the weird, hinky shit that had been going on. Bad enough he had to stand at the top of the stairs with the jar down there in that room, maybe giving off some kind of contagion despite the special box they’d locked it in. People had been getting sick in the south wing, or so he’d been told. Taejon felt okay, but the idea still creeped him out.

  Carson made a big show of yawning behind his filtration mask and then sat down. He lay on his side and drew his weapon up to his chest like a kid cuddling with his new puppy.

  “You serious?” Taejon asked.

  “Ten minutes, man.”

  They’d had way worse duties than this and gone far longer without sleep in much worse conditions. That was the nature of the army, especially out in the middle of nowhere. They’d both had posts in the desert where it was hot as the devil’s taint in the daytime and cold as Frosty’s balls at night, and Carson would never have dreamed of taking a nap or even closing his eyes for more than a minute.

  “Carson, you feeling all right?”

  With a sigh, Carson sat up and leaned against the wall. “I knew it was too good to be true.”

  Taejon couldn’t see his face at this angle. “That’s not an answer. You okay?”

  “Naw, man.
I feel like crap. Kinda queasy, sore throat, hard to keep my eyes open. You?”

  “Yeah, my throat, too,” Taejon admitted. He swallowed uncomfortably. “Head hurts. But I figure it’s mostly just exhaustion. I’ve felt worse.”

  They both knew what they were worried about, but they talked around it, never mentioning the jar. Not while discussing whether or not they felt the symptoms of any unusual sickness. Carson didn’t lie back down, but neither did he stand up. Instead, he sat with his weapon on his lap, and when Taejon glanced over at him, he saw the other man’s head had drooped a bit. A few minutes later, a soft snoring noise came from Carson.

  Son of a bitch really can sleep anywhere, Taejon thought.

  A sound made him jump. Cursing quietly, Taejon lifted his weapon and aimed into the darkness, watching the five columns in the large room. There were lighting rigs in here, but not enough to dispel the shadows, especially near those columns. What the hell had the sound been? A slap or a crack, or a single clap of someone’s hands?

  The noise came again, and this time he recognized it as the sound of flesh on flesh, the sound of pain. A desperate cry followed it, a voice raised in desperation, a plea for mercy in a language he did not understand.

  Taejon glanced at Carson, but the private remained fast asleep, slumped against the wall. A whimper arose, followed by rasping whispers, and then a series of moans that sounded more like pleasure than pain. All of them came not from the shadows around the columns but from the Pandora Room.

  He stood at the top of the stairs and peered down at the stone door, which stood sideways on its axis. Even from here, he could see shadows playing across the floor of the half-lit room, and his heart went cold.

  Taejon shook himself. No, uh-uh, he thought. Not a chance anyone could be down there, of course, because the room had been empty when he and Carson had taken up their posts—he had cleared it himself—and they had never left the spot at the top of the stairs. His eyes had been heavy, but he had not fallen asleep on his feet—he wasn’t a cow and he wasn’t Carson.

  Quietly, listening to the grunting and a cry of pain down below, Taejon went to Carson and gave him a light kick in the ribs. Jostled, Carson flapped his hands as if he might be drowning and then looked up at him.

  “What the fu—” Carson began.

  “Hush,” Taejon said, holding up a hand. “You hear that? Am I passed out on the floor and dreaming this shit?”

  Carson paused, head cocked. His expression shifted first to mild disgust and then to incomprehension. “Who’s down there?”

  Taejon shook his head. “Nobody. You were sleeping for about four minutes.”

  “Funny,” Carson said, climbing sleepily to his feet. “Try again.”

  “Unless there’s another way into that room,” Taejon said quietly, and that made him feel a little better. The Pandora Room was small, and he couldn’t see how a secret entrance would have escaped discovery by Dr. Durand’s team, but how else could people have gotten in?

  Secret entrance. It seemed like a stupid idea, but he held on to it, because otherwise he must actually be dreaming or have lost time somehow. The world felt uncertain beneath his feet as he held up his hand again, instructing Carson to stay put, and then started down the steps.

  The noises weren’t loud. Even that first slap had only startled him so much because any sound down there had been amplified by the relative quiet around it. Now, in the isolation of the staircase, the sounds seemed to swirl and eddy around him as he made that brief descent. His footsteps were quiet but not inaudible, so Taejon felt certain whoever had managed to get inside the Pandora Room would hear him coming, but the moans and whimpers and the pounding of flesh did not cease.

  “Tay,” Carson called quietly from the top of the steps.

  Taejon set one hand on the round stone door, careful not to put any weight on it. The architects had balanced it so perfectly that it turned effortlessly. Starting forward again, he put both hands on his weapon and stepped through the door, sweeping the gun barrel left to right.

  He felt a prickling at the back of his neck as he stood staring, unable at first to comprehend what he saw. A tall woman draped in rough cloth beat a young girl, grabbed her hair, pulled out a crude dagger, and began to carve lines in her skin. The girl cried out, shrieking in anguish and fear, and yet her voice sounded muffled and far away. Only a few feet from them, a robed man held a woman’s face against the wall, forearm across the back of her neck, as if he meant to take her against her will. On the other side of the room, a couple made urgent love while another man watched, fury engraved on his face, while nearby two younger men did their best to beat each other to death with stones.

  All of those noises blended into a terrible chorus, a muted, almost strangled sound, just as the people themselves were muted and distant. In the glow from the lighting rigs that still worked, they cast no shadows. Instead, shadows fell through them, as did the light—they were transparent. If they had ever been in that room at all, they were gone now, just the spectral echoes of the past. Only ghosts.

  “Holy motherfucking—” Taejon began.

  At the sound of his voice, one by one, the ghosts all turned to look at him. Taejon let out a small whimper, which he would later deny. His insides turned to jelly and he crossed himself—something he hadn’t done in years—and began to back out of the room with the ghosts tracking his exit with their eyes. The ghost of the little girl, the one with the cuts all over her flesh, grinned at him as he went.

  Back on the bottom two steps, he began breathing too fast, nearly hyperventilating inside his mask. The sounds had muffled even further, as if the ghosts were fading, and he prayed that was the case, prayed he could pretend he had not just seen what he knew he had seen.

  “Taejon,” Carson called down at him in a tone that suggested it wasn’t the first time. Then the younger man barked at him. “Corporal!”

  Gun trained on the light and shadow inside the Pandora Room, Taejon stumbled backward up several more steps before he finally managed to twist around and look blankly up at Carson.

  “What?”

  “You better get up here,” Carson said. “There’s people.”

  Taejon glanced at the entrance to the Pandora Room again, the doorway split in two by the big stone door, still open. He wanted to close it, but he didn’t want to get any closer to the room, and now the sounds had ceased and the shadows had stopped moving down there, at least as far as he could see.

  “People down here, too,” he muttered, the words so muffled inside his mask that they sounded as if someone else had spoken them.

  Carson called for him again. Taejon turned his back on the Pandora Room and hurried up the last half dozen steps, emerging into the column chamber ready to snap at Carson for his sense of drama. Then he saw the figures in the shadows near the columns, and he whipped his gun up and nearly pulled the trigger, thinking there were more ghosts, more specters doing unspeakably evil things in the darkness of Derveyî.

  One of them stepped into the light, and Taejon recognized the face if not the name—a short, broad-shouldered guy who came out of the underground at least three times a day for a smoke break. Sophie didn’t allow anyone to smoke down below. Smoke Break was some kind of engineer, the guy who strung the lights and was responsible for the generator. He had three other people with him, maybe others in the darkness behind the columns. These were north wing people, which made him feel a little better. He hadn’t heard anything about the north wing—although they were all supposed to be confined to quarters.

  “Corporal, I’m only gonna say this once,” Smoke Break announced, stepping out of the shadows. There were welts on his face, but Taejon realized quickly they weren’t just welts. He had some kind of rash, purple-black sores that were weeping something grotesque. His eyes were narrowed and puffy, and his neck looked puffy, too, and dark with bruising.

  So much for the north wing being uninfected.

  Taejon raised his weapon, not quite taking aim
at the man.

  “You folks stay back,” he said. “You know we have instructions here. The last thing you want to do is start some trouble and end up getting hurt over it.”

  Smoke Break didn’t seem to hear him, only took another step forward, gaze locked on Taejon. “You’re gonna take off those masks and give ’em over. It’s not right that you fellas got some protection and the rest of us are out here, sick with whatever’s leaked out of the damn jar. Then you’re gonna go down there and get that thing, take it outta here.”

  Carson laughed. “Buddy, there’s hundreds of people shooting at each other up there. We’re not going anywhere, and neither are you.”

  “Sir,” Taejon said, eyes narrowing. “I’m gonna ask you to back away.”

  Carson shifted, aiming first at Smoke Break and then at the other three—two other men and a woman. It was hard to tell with the other two men, but the woman had the same visible symptoms as Smoke Break. Taejon recognized her immediately, had admired her from the day of her arrival about four months ago. She was an American historian named April Riordan, a quiet woman who’d always had a smile for him when he was on sentry duty.

  Tonight April Riordan had a knife. She stepped forward.

  “Boys, here’s the story. I’m sick, and I’m not the only one. They’ve got a guard on the south wing, and word is everyone’s sick in there,” she said. “Sophie told us the people getting the masks had been the ones exposed, that her and you fellows and the rest wearing those masks was to protect the rest of us from contagion, but now we’ve got this rash, and worse, and it’s spreading, so it seems Sophie is either a liar or she made a mistake that might be killing us.”

  Taejon and Carson spread a bit farther apart, forcing the four to pick a target if they intended any violence.

  “That’s something you’ll have to take up with her,” Taejon said. “If she’s sleeping and you want to wake her, that’s not my business. But I’ll need that knife, Miss Riordan.”

  “Careful or you’ll get it,” April replied, calmly as could be. When she scowled, one of the rash blisters on her cheek burst, and black, bloody sludge dripped down her face and ran along her jawline.