The July Featured Story is by Douglas Thompson
Please feel free to visit Douglas at: tenebraedesign@yahoo.co.uk
PANDORA'S BOX
by Douglas Thompson
“Only Hope was left within its unbreakable house, and remained under the lip of the jar, and did not fly away. Before it could, Pandora replaced the lid of the jar …Thus it is not possible to escape the mind of Zeus.”
–Hesiod, Works and Days.
It was with some surprise that Martin accepted the midday delivery of a cubic cardboard box, about two feet across in every dimension, and set it down in the middle of his living room to unpack, while his Mother squawked her curiosity from the bedroom. “What is it, son? How big? Not a Christmas hamper, is it?”
“Not three months into a new year, Mam, I doubt it. I’ll open it and see.”
The packaging was incredibly precise and neat. Martin found himself reminded of the flying saucer in that movie, the original version of “The Day The Earth Stood Still”, with its perfect silver hull with no visible joins and no way in. He began to cut along the seam of an edge. There were a few generic symbols and logos on the cardboard, usual stuff about fragility and recycling, but no real clues to its contents.
He remembered another film. A horrible one. “Seven”. That scene at the end. The very idea of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lovely head in a cardboard box had made him feel sick for days afterwards. As he cut through the cardboard, he very much hoped Gwinny currently remained capitated, the dear thing.
A cardboard flap folded down, then another one, some bubble wrap, and Martin made out the side of an old wooden box, heavy and worn. He took up the scissors and kept working away until the rest of the thing was free, then set it down on the floor, riding at the centre of its own private sea of cardboard and polythene. There was no accompanying letter or invoice or credit note.
“What is it?” Mother’s voice came like a crow, picking up on the silence after the storm of packaging.
Martin could see his power of descriptions wouldn’t satisfy her, so he sighed, bit the bullet and lugged the whole heavy thing through to her room and laid it down on the foot of her bed, her old feet shuffling out of the way like scuttling crabs under the sea of quilt, just in time.
After an initial arching of the eyebrows, Mother was uncharacteristically silent.
“I don’t know what the hell it is, or who sent it,” Martin said. “Do you?”
“Sure it’s for us?” Mother whispered, as if an unpredictable wild animal were now in the room with them. “Look…” she whispered. And her gnarled fingers played across the front of it, where carved and painted in fine calligraphic writing was the simple phrase: Pandora’s Box.
“It looks old….” She said, then sniffed, “…smells of the sea.”
“A dead man’s chest…” Martin said, and mother looked up quizzically.
“Yes, it does look a bit evil, doesn’t it? Shall we open it?”
“I’ve tried,” Martin said, “but the lid is locked down.”
“No key with it? There must be a key…”
“No. Nowhere. I’ll check again. I’ll take it back through next door and try and pick the lock with one of your Kirby Grips or something. There’s something in there alright, that’s for sure, judging by the weight.”
That afternoon Martin tried a variety of keys, Mother’s hair pins and the points of needles and various other sharp objects. He was just about to contemplate hammer and chisel, but decided to make a cup of tea first. Night was just falling outside. As he turned his back on the box and made to walk towards the kitchen he heard behind him a gentle click. He froze.
There was something about the noise that he found indescribably creepy. A stealth, a slowness to it, that seemed alive. He shivered and turned back around. The irrational impression hit him that the thing had been toying with him. That it was ready to open now, but only on its own terms and in its own good time.
He knelt down and slowly lifted the lid. A noise like the slowed-down voice of an old man in pain emerged along with a swishing wind. Martin almost put the lid back down, but now it kept pushing up of its own accord. A slow grey mushroom cloud emerged and began to billow upwards. Martin stepped back in alarm. The whole light in the room changed. B52 bombers appeared and began sailing across from the ceiling cornice at Martin’s right, heading down to towards the fireplace to his left. Searchlights emerged from the box, moving to and fro, as if looking for the tiny aeroplanes. Sirens sounded from inside the box and tracer fire, anti-aircraft flak began shooting up.
“What is it? What’s going on?” –Martin’s Mother’s voice called from the bedroom.
Martin moved tentatively closer on his hands and knees and peered down over the edges of the box. Inside he could see a miniature city, ravaged by flames, a firestorm, churches and houses and offices collapsing. He thought he could even hear the sound of tiny fire engines and human screams. At that, he began to feel particularly uncomfortable.
He reached out for the hinged lid, and gingerly, somehow expecting it to be hot or wet, he lifted it back up and over and closed the box. Instantly the horrors stopped, and the light in the room returned to normal. Although Martin could see that traces of acrid grey smoke were still blowing around the ceiling, slowly dispersing.
“Are you alright, Martin? What was that noise?”
Again, Martin could anticipate his complete failure to explain this. So carefully, with even more trepidation that before, he heaved the big box up in his arms and took it through to his mother.
“Well?” She asked as he got his breath back.
“It was the damndest thing…” he said. “It’s like some kind of cinema projector. A whole war scene came out of it, little planes and bombs.”
“A toy?” Mother asked.
Martin furrowed his brow. “Well, it seemed rather sombre for that.”
“Can I? Shall we?” Mother asked eagerly, her old claw-like hand gripping at the lid edge.
“Be my guest,” Martin said, “but slow, mind, and careful.”
The lid came up again and this time no mushroom cloud emerged. For a moment Martin felt foolish, until he heard a scraping noise from inside and the box began to shake a little. Mother sat up in bed, and Martin leaned over to peer down inside the box, and there was a large white mouse. A lab rat you might call it, running around and around, unable to climb up the smooth mirrored surface of the box’s interior.
Puzzled and astonished, Martin reached both hands down into the box and pulled the rat up and out. It squealed and wriggled in a not unappealing way. It was rather cute, but both Martin and his mother gasped as they noticed this rat’s most distinctive feature: it had a human ear, alive and apparently functional, stitched onto its back like a pink quivering shark fin.
Mother cried out and Martin felt strangely sick at exactly the same moment, and dropped the thing without even thinking about it, back into the box. Martin and his mother looked at each other in alarm, as the scratching resumed inside. “You better wash your hands, son. The thing might have rabies for all we know…”
Martin was impressed by his mother’s calm practical logic in the middle of a supernatural crisis. He stood up. “Close the lid, Mam, close it and keep it closed until I come back.”
In the bathroom, he was busy washing his hands thoroughly and about to reflect on his own perplexed expression in the mirror, when he heard a scream then a muffled squawk from his mother. He hurriedly dried his hands, then ran back through to her room.
At first he thought she had disappeared, since he could no longer see her in the bed. The light now coming from the box, open again, was making it hard to make out the shadows in the room. But gradually his eyes adjusted and he saw that his mother was standing in fear by the window, clutching the edge of the curtains.
His astonishment at the thought of his mother standing up unassisted for the first time in ten years was temporarily overtaken by his curiosity at the box’s latest incarnation. There was a sort of whizzing and electronic sizzling noise coming from it.
He edged closer and knelt on the edge of the bed and peered down into the box’s interior. Some kind of model racetrack was at work there now. A futuristic silver donut in which little different-coloured particles of light were being made to accelerate and collide with one another. On the outside of the ring, he thought he could vaguely make out the roofs and church spires of a little village or town, vaguely Swiss-looking.
“Martin…” his mother’s voice sounded strangely altered from the shadows behind him. “Don’t close the box. Whatever you do, never close that box again…”
Martin stood up and turned around to face her. She was emerging from the shadows, looking down at her own body, running a hand over her own face. She was starting to cry, tears running down her face, in the twilight. “I’m….. I’m changed. I’m younger. I’m…” She reached for the wardrobe door and pulled it open to reveal the full-height mirror as Martin fumbled with the bedside light.
Then they both saw it was true. Had it not been for her voice, the same but altered, clearer, stronger and more youthful, he might not have recognised the woman standing before him. She was strikingly beautiful: long blonde hair, shining eyes, smooth perfect skin, her whole body a dazzling intersection of harmonious curves. He averted his eyes as they wandered downwards, blushing, confused. But he had to look back again at her face, its beauty was life-giving. He could see the likeness, the family likeness, the young mother he dimly remembered from childhood, and from faded old photographs. He also recognised himself, the resemblance in the eyes and chin and nose. He remembered who he was, his creation manifest before him. He felt like kneeling, for a crazy moment, as if before a goddess. “Y-you’re so beautiful, Mam, it’s heartbreaking isn’t it?”
“Yes,” the radiant young woman whispered, nodding, pulling her hair back and gazing again into the mirror in incredulity. “How’s this possible?”
Martin went to the window and gazed out over the long grass blowing in the wind, the old rubble walls, the sea and shore. “How’s anything possible, Mam? Isn’t everything a miracle? Aren’t you a miracle? And amn’t I?”
“Yes…” his mother wept, and sat down on the edge of the bed, “of course…”
*****
It wasn’t too late. Once she had remembered it was Saturday night, Martin’s mother wouldn’t take no for an answer. They had looked out all her old dresses, and Martin had had to retreat to the living room to escape her unabashed nakedness. Now they were in his car and on the road into town, all twenty-eight miles away, her hair washed and brushed and her neck splashed with alluring perfumes. But as they turned the corner past the ruined church at Fernlea, she made him stop for a moment and they got out together.
The sunset had been and gone now but it was a clear night and a full moon rising up over the machair. They opened the gate and walked between the graves, past all the patient little crosses.
“This is where I want to be buried, Martin. It’s where we’d have buried your father if he hadn’t been lost at sea. Isn’t it gorgeous here tonight, so peaceful?”
Martin couldn’t disagree. He looked up at the old church tower and smiled to see that its clock was broken, frozen on some earlier hour from decades long past. A wood dove cooed in the eaves and a fox emerged from the crypt and looked at them, eyes glimmering in the moonlight, then scarpered off. The sighing of the wind in the dune grass seemed indistinguishable for a moment from the sound of the sea.
“When did the clergy give this up?” –Martin asked, nearly calling her “Mam” as usual, but stopping himself, the name feeling inappropriate now. But her real name also still seemed beyond reach.
Martin’s mother shrugged. “God hasn’t given it up, Martin…” she sighed and turned to look at him, and even in the half-light her beauty was so intense he had to look away.
*****
He didn’t much like the thought, but in town he made himself busy with a couple of moonlit walks about the old familiar streets, interspersed with sentimental drinks in his erstwhile haunts. The Ship Inn, The Fiddlers Arms, An Fuaran, The Tigh-na-Clachan. Meanwhile, his mother danced the night away in the Town Hall, the sound and sight of drunken merriment dappling the cobbled streets outside with shards of light as occasional doors opened and closed. Martin passed by a few times, but didn’t want to get too close. Afraid to glimpse his mother in the arms of some young whippersnapper, just taking her for granted, not knowing the miracle they had chanced upon.
At the appointed hour, he waited with a cigarette by the harbour wall, and there she was, saying goodnight to some drunken lad, after a last swaying embrace under the lamplights.
On the drive home, she chuckled and rambled with the wine wagging her tongue, but he didn’t mind as much as he thought he might. Some Donny MacLeod had been trying to impress her with tales about the size of his father’s tractor. No, really. And an Angus MacNeil regaling her with his tales of life as a Cairngorm deer stalker, and what a dancer he had been, comparing her to a young hind. Names were so few and similar in these parts and this culture, that Martin couldn’t really be sure if he knew any of these men or their fathers. Maybe just as well.
Just as he was starting to wonder about issues like guilt and fidelity, she unexpectedly changed the subject, as if reading his mind: “I miss your father, you know that?”
“Yeah?” Martin answered, “I know, I know, of course you do.”
“You should find yourself someone, a wife, Martin. It’s not too late. It should have been you in there, not me. I saw lots of other eligible young ladies, and not so young ones.”
“I know, Mam, I know.”
“There are so many lonely souls out there, and finding another one gives you hope. It’s like a missing jigsaw piece, it allows you to be alone again afterwards, but complete. Your father completed me, allowed me to be who I really am. We’re all interconnected... like the stars in the sky. What a lovely night I’ve had.”
“That’s nice, Mam…” he said, but soon saw that she was nodding off to sleep. “The stars aren’t connected at all though,” he muttered to himself a few minutes later. “They’re trillions of miles apart, aren’t they?” Why had she said such an odd thing?
Back home, Martin found it strange after years of helping her, to have to remove himself from her company so she could undress herself now, even if a little tipsy, and retired strategically to his room.
He felt surprisingly awake and restless for a moment, and switched on his computer and looked up scientific research: the Hubble Telescope, CERN in Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider. Somehow the tiny invisible world and the world of the stars were interconnected it seemed, in some almost mystical way that scientists felt sure they were right on the verge of being able to grasp. It almost sounded like religion to him, the Holy Trinity, or some other irresolvable leap of faith.
He went in to check on his mother and found she was thoroughly and contentedly asleep. At the sight of her beautiful dreaming face, he suddenly felt very tired himself after all.
The mysterious wooden box still lay on the bed, whizzing and humming and filling the darkened room with a hallowed muted light, like a colourful Christmas tree or an all-night vigil. Not stopping to think, he reached out and closed its lid over, so he could lift it up off the bed and give his mother more room to sleep. Turning on the way out the door he glanced back and cried out at what he saw, dropping the box onto his own toes.
When the sun rose in the morning, sending its first rays into the room to find him, Martin still lay doubled-up on the empty bed weeping, clutching his mother’s discarded dancing shoes. He knew where she had gone now and where he would take all he had left of her, the contents of the terrible and beautiful box. It had arrived in their lives unbidden, but not without purpose, as he now saw.
As soon as he felt strong enough, he would take it to the abandoned churchyard and bury it in an unmarked grave, in the shadow of a tower that God still remembered. No need for a stone or a cross, with a box that after all, had always borne her name.
Douglas Thompson's short stories have appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, most recently Ambit, Postscripts, and New Writing Scotland. He won the Grolsch/Herald Question of Style Award in 1989 and second prize in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition in 2007. His first book, Ultrameta, was published by Eibonvale Press in August 2009, nominated for the Edge Hill Prize, and shortlisted for the BFS Best Newcomer Award. His critically acclaimed second novel, Sylvow, was published in autumn 2010, also from Eibonvale. A third novel Apoidea was released from The Exaggerated Press in 2011, a fourth Mechagnosis is due from Dog Horn in June 2012, and a fifth Entanglement is due from Elsewhen Press in August 2012. http://douglasthompson.wordpress.com/
See The Horror Zine review for Apoidea HERE
