“You’re scaring me to death,” I said, hoping it sounded like a lie.
“If I’m not,” he said, “something is seriously wrong with you. About Pandora.”
“Oh, stuff Pandora.”
“Please stop disappointing me. You said to my mother that you knew who I am, but not why I am. Is that more or less accurate?”
“More,” I said, wiping my forehead with my sleeve and pulling the bandage away. The blood started immediately, and I held the cold bottle of Singha against the cut.
“Well, then, sit tight and listen. Have you got the gun with you?”
“I’m using it to keep my back straight.”
“Get your shirts starched.” Wilton Hoxley barked a laugh. “Listen, insect. After Prometheus took fire to earth in a stalk of fennel-”
“The fennel was painfully obvious,” I said.
“Obvious? Please. Was that why you had to go see that old fart Blinkins?”
“Blinkins and I are old friends,” I said, warding off a sudden desire to cross myself.
“Of course you are. We all love Blinkins. Do you like the Greeks?”
“As Greeks go.” I was regretting the fact that I’d spurned Schultz’s offer of protection.
“Then you’ll like this,” he said. “Pandora was Zeus’ revenge against Prometheus’ treachery. She was the first woman, remember? After Prometheus gave fire back to human beings-who were all apparently men at that point-”
“Sounds like a world you would have liked.”
“You can’t goad me,” he said. “Listen. Prometheus had a stupid brother-”
“Epimetheus,” I said.
“Bully for you. And Epimetheus was living, with a lot of other males, on the corrupt earth. Zeus commanded Hephaestus, who could do anything over the fire in his forge, to create Pandora. Then, just to cover his bets, he told Hephaestus’ wife…” He faltered.
“Aphrodite,” I said. “A beauty married to a clubfoot.”
“Hera was Hephaestus’ mother,” he said. It was the first thing he hadn’t meant to say.
“Chucked him out of heaven,” I said.
“All the way to the glittering sea,” Wilton Hoxley said. “But he got back-”
“Which is more than you’ve managed to do.” The semi was still cold between my knees. My cut had stopped bleeding, so I drank some beer.
“You’re boring me,” Hoxley said flatly. “I’m way beyond baiting.”
“What’s next, Wilton? You got a new mission?”
“My mission at the moment is to explain to you about Pandora. Aphrodite made her irresistible, like a tailor cutting a coat for a dandy. And she went to earth, this girl, this ancestor of Eleanor’s, and she attached herself, as she was meant to do, to stupid Epimetheus.”
“And she brought her box with her.”
“Oh, good, you are sentient. And the box contained all the evils that the gods could conceive to plague mankind, and she, with feminine curiosity, opened it. The only good thing in it, the spirit Hope, was trapped inside when Pandora, terrified by the things she had let loose upon the world, snapped the lid shut. Typical woman,” he said. “Too little, too late, like all of them. And you think I still want Eleanor? Although I’ll admit that it would be interesting to see her burn.”
“What’s next?” I asked out of sheer desperation.
“Oh, Simeon,” Wilton Hoxley said, “out of all the people in the world, I would have thought you could have figured out what’s next. You know my history. If you can’t work it out, what’s the use of faith in this world? I simply cannot tell you how disappointed I am. Why should Eleanor, why should anybody, trust you with her life when you’re such a stumblefoot?”
“But wait,” I said. He disconnected.
PART FOUR
18
This is what it said: 127.
The letters were black and even, set in type. They occupied maybe a square inch of paper that must once have been the upper right-hand corner of a left-facing page. There was nothing else.
The cheery canary-yellow envelope was tiny, the kind little kids get birthday cards in. It had arrived in the regular mail, and my name and address were in blue ballpoint in a normal, everyday handwriting, a small and precise handwriting but nothing as inhumanly rigid as the square, tightrope-straight gold calligraphy of the first notes.
I might have dismissed it, except for the return address on the envelope’s back flap. It said: From the forge of Hephaestus.
“One twenty-seven,” Schultz said over the phone. He lit up.
“Page one twenty-seven,” I corrected him.
“Yeah,” Schultz said. “Put it in the mailbox. We’ll call the Topanga P.O. And tell them we’ll be by to pick it up after they collect it. We’ll analyze it six ways from Sunday.” Then he started to cough.
“You really ought to quit,” I said. “Your prognosis is terrible.”
“Look who’s talking,” he said.
There’s not a lot you can do to get ready for someone who’s promised to burn you to death, but in the two days between my telephone conversation with Wilton Hoxley and the arrival of the three-number note, I’d done everything I could think of, mainly to keep moving. Sometimes even a futile gesture can be reassuring.
I’d started on Friday morning, the morning after the call.
“Six eight-gallon plastic buckets,” said the checker at the Fernwood Market, ringing them up. “Twenty-four- can that be right, twenty-four? — cotton towels, two, um, sixteen-foot garden hoses, four of whatever these are called, at two-twenty-nine apiece.” I didn’t know what they were called either, but they were short lengths of metal tubing with spiral threads at both ends. She dropped them into the bag. “Two nozzles?”
“I’ve got two hoses,” I explained.
“Piano wire?” she said, holding up a spool.
“It’s a jazz piano. Always wants to get wired.”
“And seven sets of wind chimes,” she said, putting them onto the counter with an unmelodious clatter. “All those bells,” she said. “Let’s hope you’re a sound sleeper.”
“Let’s hope I’m not,” I said.
I coasted Alice into the Valley, where I bought an extralarge sweat suit. Last stop was a Thrifty Drug Store, all overbright white fluorescent lights and underpaid brown help. The help sold me three of those thin plastic raincoats that meteorological paranoids fold up and carry in their pockets. All the way home I hummed complacently.
But halfway up the driveway, toting my haul in two huge cardboard paper-towel cartons with Bravo Corrigan trotting along at my heels and offering moral support, I got mad. If I hadn’t had to behave as though I were living under a mad scientist’s microscope, I could have carried the things up a few at a time, like a normal suburban American, over the space of an hour or so; instead, I’d needed cartons so he couldn’t see my surprises, pathetic as they were. I dumped the junk where I stood and clambered up to the phone to call Schultz’s number of the
