The Pandora Room: A Novel Page 8

  SEVEN

  Kim lay in the dark, trying not to scream.

  It had been so foolish of her to come here, but in the moment when the assignment had come to her, she had felt a powerful serendipity. Nearly two years before, she had met Walker in Turkey on the way to Mount Ararat. A pair of young adventurers had found what they believed might be the historical root of the tale of Noah’s Ark. It had seemed so exciting to her then—a landslide revealing a mountainside cave, the ark in the cave, this kind man who had been broken more than once and put himself back together—but in the back of the ark had been something else.

  She didn’t like to use the word demon, even now.

  Nearly everyone had died. Most of those deaths had been chalked up to a murderer among the archaeological team—a very different, less professional group than this one—and the rest had been blamed on the blizzard through which they’d descended to escape the cave.

  But Kim remembered. The things she’d seen had scarred her deeply, invisibly, and she had been asked not to speak of them to anyone but Walker or a therapist. Her coworkers, even her direct superiors, had no idea about what really happened on that mountain. How could she tell them when so many would think her mind had unraveled? Even if those within the U.N. who knew the truth stood up for her—and she knew they would not—so many would never believe her.

  So she kept the memories to herself, and the less she talked about them, the more they festered inside her.

  Tight places frightened her. Airless spaces, windowless rooms made her heart race and her gut churn. Deep darkness gave her chills, made her want to weep. Worst yet, an unexpected grin from friend or stranger made her want to scream. There were no demons behind such grins, nothing hidden in the dark. The private therapist she had seen for the first year had promised her that, but the woman clearly had not believed anything Kim had told her. Which meant she couldn’t know those unexpected grins hid nothing sinister. She simply couldn’t know.

  Now she lay in the dark, in a windowless room—a cave underground—with the utter certainty that something malign breathed and pulsed inside the Pandora Room, and the urge to scream built up steam in her chest. The filtration mask lay on a small desk in the corner of the room.

  The jar might be nothing. She knew that. Odds were it was empty or contained dust or some sort of time capsule that would make the world’s archaeological community reach an earthshaking collective orgasm. No curses, no blessings, no evils. But in the dark, with nearly all the Beneath Project’s personnel asleep in various chambers throughout Derveyî, she felt small and suffocated and helpless.

  Kim exhaled. Eyes wide in the dark, she glanced at the doorway, comforted by the illumination glowing beyond the privacy curtain but afraid, each time she glanced at it, that a silhouette would appear. Her heart fluttered, and she pulled her gaze away, turned on her side, and stared at the sleeping form of Dr. Tang on the next bunk. Dr. Tang twitched and muttered in her sleep as if she were fighting her own subconscious battles. Beyond her were three other bunks, only one of them occupied—a grad student named Rachel shared the space with them. Many members of the staff of the Beneath Project had already finished their work and departed. The dig had been winding down before the Pandora Room had been discovered, so there were open beds for Kim and her team.

  Her team. She smiled weakly at the thought, although she had been disappointed that Walker hadn’t bristled at being under her thumb. His egalitarian nature had impressed her early on, strange traits for a man with so secretive a life. She hadn’t expected him to be troubled by a woman telling him what to do but by anyone telling him what to do when it came to a field assignment. Kim knew better than to be fooled by his quiet acceptance. If push came to shove, he would do whatever he thought was necessary to protect the people around him. It was the reason she would have wanted him on this assignment regardless of their personal connection.

  The thought of Walker—sharing quarters with Dunlap two rooms down the corridor—eased her mind a little. Yes, she’d have asked for him in spite of the personal connection, but it certainly helped. When she’d heard that Derveyî was a subterranean city, a network of caves and tunnels, it had triggered a fear response that she’d barely been able to hide behind a thin smile and too much nodding. When she’d heard what Sophie Durand thought she’d found, she’d had to excuse herself from the room and compose herself before returning.

  Even now she wondered why she had accepted the assignment. She’d read enough about PTSD and spoken to enough veterans and survivors of violence and catastrophe that she knew she needed more help than she was getting. But a part of her—the part nurtured in the care of her perfectionist mother—needed to keep up the unflappable mask of normalcy. The rest of her was just stubborn, like her father, who had taught her to face her fears head-on.

  But she didn’t have to face them alone. If she’d learned anything from her time with Walker, it was that. Kim wasn’t sure she could have said they were in love, but they were certainly intimate. He had lived through Ararat with her and understood the person that experience had made her better than anyone, even though she had never told him about the nightmares. Never told him that even now, when she closed her eyes, she could still see the horned thing in the coffin …

  Kim saw it now. While her thoughts had been drifting, her eyelids had lowered. Without being aware of it, she had slid toward the edge of sleep, nearly there, and now the memory of that dry, desiccated thing surfaced and her pulse began a familiar, dreadful gallop.

  With a sigh, yearning for real, restorative sleep, she opened her eyes and saw a silhouetted figure beyond the privacy curtain. Staring, she realized the figure was not behind the curtain after all but in front of it, there in the room with her and yet dark and featureless as a shadow. Kim’s breath quickened, heart racing as she tried to tell herself she must be asleep after all. She could feel malice in the room, taste it.

  Beside her, Dr. Tang whimpered. With a gasp of relief, so happy not to be alone in this moment, Kim turned to find the woman had not woken and seen the shadow but made yet another strange muttering in her sleep. Dr. Tang rustled beneath her sheets, grumbled, and turned to face the other direction in her bed.

  When Kim glanced toward the privacy curtain again, the silhouette had gone, as if it had never been there at all. Her breathing began to slow, but her heart took time to quiet as she wondered if she had imagined it. Was her psyche so broken that she’d conjured something terrifying out of thin air? She had come here to face her fear, to challenge her trauma, not to relive it. Or so she hoped.

  Being in Derveyî had frightened her, but she’d forged on regardless of fear. Now she thought she might’ve been foolish instead of brave, that being underground might make her unravel. She had an assignment here—a few days at most and she could leave, just as soon as the jar had been removed.

  A few days.

  At most.

  If she told Walker what she was enduring, would that make him less likely to fulfill his duties to his employers, or more so? Kim thought he might try to take more decisive action, thinking he was helping her by allowing her to go home sooner. She would have to keep a close eye on him, but she knew he would comfort her if she needed it, and he would fight at her side if it came to that. They’d proven themselves to each other already.

  As for Sophie Durand, she seemed smart and competent. If tonight became too difficult for Kim, she’d find Sergeant Dunlap and ask him to see if there might be a bunk available with the military unit outside Derveyî. She was sure Sophie wouldn’t mind. Sleeping in a tent would be better than this, by far.

  Just the thought soothed her. A tent sounded like a fantastic idea.

  A few days, she thought again.

  When she fell asleep, she did so facing away from the privacy curtain. If there were more shadows out there, Kim did not want to see them. Better for them to take her unaware, she believed, than to feel the terror of their coming.

  A few days.

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nbsp; * * *

  Beyza could often be found walking in the tunnels late at night. Members of the staff sometimes went up for air or gathered in one of the common rooms where work had already been completed. They might put on some music and drink whiskey or play a card game. She had walked past the entrance to the lower-level baths one night and spotted half a dozen staffers playing strip poker like a bunch of horny teenagers, but who was she to judge?

  The staff of the Beneath Project had become a family, and over the long months they had learned one another’s habits and peccadillos. Alton smoked the cigarillos he had grown up seeing in old Western movies. Marissa did late-night yoga and occasionally guilted others to join her. Kevin Ruiz had a guitar and a harmonica, and he liked to play but didn’t really like to have an audience, so he would often explore the remotest tunnels, venturing into areas that had not borne archaeological fruit or where the team’s work had been completed. Depending where he set up, his music might reach one part of the tunnel system or another. He would play and sing quietly, and most of the time nobody mentioned they could hear him for fear that he would turn shy and the late-night concerts would stop. He played beautifully, and they had all been down there in the subterranean world long enough to appreciate such things.

  Tonight, all seemed quiet in the world underneath. If there were people blasting music, or if Ruiz had taken his guitar into one of those private places, not a single note reached her. Beyza found herself humming as she made her way through the tunnels and down curving staircases, then through a door most of the staff had never noticed. She avoided the atrium, which had become the intersection and public square for the project. Few knew the curves and passages the way she did. Some had never seen the tiled mosaics in what she thought of as the Sun Room because it received more natural light than almost anywhere else in the city. The ventilation shafts brought in slivers of daylight that checkered the stone floor when the sun shone, and even on moonlit nights the room seemed to glow.

  The room had been one of the first they had explored. It had been photographed, the mosaics cleaned, several artifacts had been discovered, and one ancient altar had been removed in its entirety and sent to her employers at Atatürk University. It would eventually be part of a traveling museum display cosponsored by the dig’s sponsors and the Iraqi and Kurdish governments.

  Of course, the Pandora Room had changed everything. No one cared about mosaics or altars or even that traveling museum display now. The focus would shift, even if they found the jar to be empty. The writing on the altar, the walls, and the jar created the perfect twenty-first-century narrative. So much of the world’s population didn’t bother to read, but there were still stories that would fire the imagination, and Beyza knew this would do it. An ancient myth come true, the promise of one jar and the threat of the other. It had romance and danger and politics all bound up together. She thought that perhaps, for at least a news cycle or two, the Beneath Project would make the world interested in archaeology and history, but she had earned enough wisdom to know it wouldn’t last.

  Still, in the community of people who loved knowledge and learning, it would be the revelation of a lifetime, and she was proud to be a part of that. Soon, it would come to an end, and although part of her yearned to go home, there was another part of her as well.

  She stood in the moonlight, thinking how ironic it was that she called it the Sun Room but came here so often at night. The shafts of light seemed as always to make the shadows around them even darker. Something shifted off to her right, the outline of a figure in the dark, the scuff of a boot, and a smile touched Beyza’s lips. She was a serious woman, dedicated to her work, but her visits to the Sun Room released her from that gravity, allowed her to float, unveiled the core of her.

  “You were early for once,” she whispered.

  In the shadows between shafts of moonlight, the darkness coalesced and Beyza smiled, her heartbeat quickening. She wished someone, somewhere would play music so that it could drift to them through the vents and drafty corridors. Music helped ease her tension, and it let her tell herself that the sounds of their lovemaking would not be heard elsewhere in the labyrinth. Tonight she would try to be silent, although she rarely succeeded in the moment, crying out even after she’d bitten her lip bloody.

  Hands touched her sides, began to slide around her abdomen, a body pressing against her from behind. Beyza shouted and threw herself forward, out of reach. She turned, mouthing a stream of profanity that would have shocked most of her colleagues, but none so much as Elio Cortez.

  He stood staring at her, frozen between apology and amusement.

  “Just saying hello,” he said.

  Beyza took two strides and punched him in the chest harder than she’d meant to. “Don’t sneak up on a woman like that! You scared the hell out of me!”

  Cortez chuckled quietly, raised a hand to try to hide it, and then burst out laughing. “I’m sorry. I just … you should have seen the look on your face.”

  “It’s not funny!”

  “Well, it is a little bit funny. From my point of view.” He massaged his chest where she had struck him. “A little bit painful, too. Were you expecting someone else?”

  Beyza could not keep herself from smiling, though her heart continued to thunder in her chest. “I haven’t invited anyone else, if that’s what you mean. I don’t make a habit of this sort of thing.”

  Cortez moved closer to her, took her hands, and kissed them. “This sort of thing. You make it sound forbidden.”

  “You know it is.” She didn’t like to talk about this part, about what it would do to her reputation among her colleagues if it became public knowledge that she had carried on an extramarital affair with a graduate student under her supervision. She could lose her job. Her husband might divorce her, but that conflict had been developing for years and was only a matter of time.

  “I like that it’s forbidden,” Cortez said, sliding his fingers into her hair, tilting her head back to kiss her.

  The kiss deepened, and her pulse raced even faster. His hands stroked her back, then held her firmly as he kissed her neck. Gently, he kissed her forehead and her temples as he began to undress her.

  “Did I really frighten you?”

  Beyza smiled. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “You were speaking to me. I thought you knew I was here.”

  She had been unbuttoning his shirt, but her hands faltered. He kissed her neck again, rolled his thumbs across her now bare nipples and kissed them. Beyza’s body responded, her fingers tangling in his hair, wanting his mouth lower. He obliged, laying her down on her own discarded shirt, but as he parted her legs, Beyza felt the powerful lure of that space between shafts of moonlight, that shadowed corner where she had felt sure Cortez had been waiting for her. All she saw there now was darkness within darkness, no suggestion of a human figure.

  Cortez’s tongue found its mark, and suddenly all fears and worries were forgotten.

  “Elio,” she whispered.

  And if something in shadows beyond the moonlight whispered back, Beyza could not hear it.

  EIGHT

  Night had passed, and the day, and now sunset approached again.

  Sophie couldn’t breathe. In the year she’d spent in the haunting, ethereal chambers and corridors of Derveyî, she had never felt claustrophobic. All that had changed. Even out here, aboveground, with the sun warming her and the breeze tugging at her clothes and her hair—even here, where she could see miles around her—she felt as if the walls of the world were closing in.

  Get it together, she thought. You’re in charge.

  She wanted to laugh at the idea, but instead she felt a twist of nausea in her gut. Not long ago, the only vehicles around the dig were a handful of dusty Jeeps and a truck bearing the UNESCO logo. Other cars had come and gone. A general supply delivery had arrived twice a week. She’d spoken on her phone and via video conferencing with her boss, Alex, every few days, but other than that, she had been the woman
in authority. Even the handful of U.S. and Kurdish soldiers who had been posted at the dig for the duration tended to look to her for guidance.

  All that was over now.

  The number of vehicles had more than quadrupled. Most were military. The coalition between American and Kurdish forces held, but the Kurds were prickly as hell now that rumors had begun to spread. Most of them knew something major had been discovered, and that had only been amplified in the twenty-four hours since Walker, Kim, and Dr. Tang had arrived. According to Lamar, the whispers about Pandora’s box had begun with diggers and soldiers, and by now those rumors would be out in the world. Any version of that story, truth or fiction, would lead to a great deal of attention, much sooner than she wanted.

  Now a new truck had arrived. Dr. Tang had spoken to Major Bernstein, the CO of the coalition troops on-site, just so that she wouldn’t step on his toes. Then she had called a friend with USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Under ordinary circumstances, Dr. Tang had explained, she would have been content to wait for whatever the army’s red tape might do, but given that they wanted to move the jar to a safer location as soon as possible, Dr. Tang had recommended they get a small USAMRIID team out of Baghdad immediately to properly pack up and move the jar.

  Sophie knew Alex Jarota would hate the idea, but she was thrilled. When she had heard the United Nations might intervene, she had been anxious, but Dr. Tang had the contacts and the sense of urgency to move things forward.

  The white box truck, its wheels outfitted for the rutted roads, had pulled into the compound an hour earlier. Sophie had watched as the techs from USAMRIID climbed out. If anyone still doubted they had a crisis on their hands, that doubt would have been erased the moment the techs had opened the back of the truck and began to step into pale blue hazmat suits.

  “Shit,” Sophie sighed, glancing over at the box truck.