Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

More donations, more influence. His infamy grew. Rumours circulated. He impregnated a maid in his service or, one newspaper reported, held a ritual in which the poor girl was impregnated by ‘something else’. Gossip spread about his activities in Africa: stolen relics, black mistresses, wartime atrocities. A minor Hapsburg duchess committed suicide, bequeathing her entire estate to Bludkraft. Her family sued: Bludkraft settled with them out of court for a reputedly vast sum.

  Then the occult societies turned on him. His beliefs were not Aryan, they said, not in accordance with the principles of European paganism which were the proper subjects for German and Austrian occultism. The leaders of the movement, Guido von Liste and Jorg Lanz, wrote letters denouncing him. The same day they were published in the newspapers, a lunatic attacked Bludkraft in the street, stabbing him in front of dozens of witnesses. His wounds were said to be horrific, mortal; but he appeared in public a few days later with only a slight limp.

  The rumours around Bludkraft intensified. Church groups held prayer meetings outside his house. An anonymous pamphlet denouncing him appeared throughout Vienna overnight, plastered on street corners and public squares. It claimed that he found ‘something’ during his excavations beneath the Saqqara necropolis: it hinted at a tomb, a relic, some unspeakable secret that he unearthed and bought back to Vienna. Bludkraft represented something malign, the pamphlet alleged, something alien, something ancient, and he should be considered an enemy agent acting against the Emperor, his loyal subjects and the wider Germanic race.

  The day after the pamphlet appeared, there was another attempt on his life. Shots were fired at Bludkraft’s carriage as he left the house of his mistress. He continued home: his valet saw blood on his clothes; the maid reported blood in his chamber pot. Late that night the maid heard raised voices, then shouting from Bludkraft’s study; she knew he was alone in the room.

  The next day, 5 January 1914, the police called on Bludkraft to investigate the shooting. He was gone. No one saw him leave. They concluded that he had been murdered and his body disposed of, either by a rival occult group or by his more unsavoury creditors to whom he owed a fortune. He had not run away—they were sure of that. His bank accounts were untouched; the house was filled with cash and valuables. Only a large trunk he kept locked in his study was missing. Stolen by his killers, perhaps. No suspect was ever named.

  The final pages of the book discussed Bludkraft’s significance as an explorer and archaeologist. Danyl skimmed through them. He noted the acknowledgments in which the author, a professor of German history at a iniversity in Canada, thanked a Mr S Parsons for his contributions to the chapters on occultism.

  Danyl took up the photo album again, inspecting the picture of Bludkraft standing outside his house in Te Aro. The photo was dated 1 June 1914.

  Six months after Bludkraft was declared dead in Vienna.

  Danyl removed the photograph from the album, and doing so noticed pinholes in the corners. He checked the other pictures in the album. They were all unpunctured. And, here was another odd thing—two of the pages in the album were empty, but there was glue residue daubed in the vacant frames: the photographs had been removed.

  He put the picture of his house on his bedside table and leaned it against the wall. Bludkraft stared out from the past; the open door behind him cast in shadow. Danyl thought about the voice on the phone, the figure he’d glimpsed watching him from the window of the house on Holloway Road. He touched the pinholes with his finger.

  Someone else once took an interest in this specific photograph. He wondered if that was a coincidence.

  8

  The crier

  From Stasia the Healer

  to

  the Crippled Danyl

  Dear Seeker of Wellness,

  Trust no one. Forget everything you have ever learned.

  Keep your injured foot elevated on a bed, couch, footstool or box.

  Use a compression bandage IF you have one. DO NOT GO OUTSIDE.

  An ice pack will reduce inflammation for the first 48 hours post-injury.

  Speak to no one.

  Show this letter to no one. Keep stationary as much as possible. You WILL see me again.

  Joy! Annihilation! The skies!

  Stasia

  Danyl reread the letter several times. It was, he decided, the best medical advice he had ever received. He stuck it to his refrigerator door next to the stolen box notice.

  And he would follow her instructions. Eventually, after his expedition to the market. He needed to buy painkillers and food and to visit Verity, apologise to her for failing to pick up his box and show her how crippled and helpless he was, and thus win her pity and woo her back.

  So: a busy day ahead. He picked up his backpack and tossed in his keys and wallet and, casting around for a book in case he needed to stop and rest somewhere, added the Bludkraft biography and the photo album. He stood and shouldered the backpack, balanced on his crutches, and left the house.

  It was mid-morning. The sun was over the hills, the air was warm and the sky was an endless heartbreaking blue. Even Danyl’s back garden looked less desolate than usual.

  This garden was about the size of a tennis court: it was a broken series of pits and mounds scattered with rubbish and choked with weeds—the kind of landscape lunatics take pictures of and send to local newspapers as evidence of ruined prehuman civilisations. Danyl moved carefully through this terrain, testing the ground with his crutches and skirting around a discarded toilet bowl. The garden was fenced at the back and in the centre of the fence was a large gate-shaped hole. He stepped through it and emerged onto the abandoned road.

  This was a longer, less direct way to the markets but it was secret; private. It was important, Danyl felt, to keep a low profile until his foot healed. His enemies might watch for him on the main roads, but not here.

  He walked along the path, enjoying the sylvan tranquillity, the soft green light through the trees, the birdsong, the sun on his face. He thought about Wolfgang Bludkraft and wondered what secret combination of fates took him from pre-war Vienna to the Aro Valley, and how the mysterious and sinister S Parsons was bound up in this.

  Danyl had phoned Steve earlier that morning to tell him about his late-night discoveries and to see if Steve had made any progress identifying Parsons, only to be brushed off. ‘I’m busy working on my thesis,’ he said. ‘I’m following up an unique research opportunity. No, I can’t go into details. It’s confidential. I’ll touch base later, buddy.’ Then he hung up.

  Confidential? Danyl snorted. He wondered if Steve had some part-time job he was too embarrassed to reveal: telemarketing maybe, or delivering motivational speeches to corporate executives. He smiled at this last thought, then the smile fell away.

  Something was wrong.

  He halted in the middle of the path. There was a strange, keening noise in the air. It wasn’t birdsong—the birds, he noticed, were silent. It sounded like someone crying. It came from further along the old road, where the track narrowed and dipped into shadow. Danyl heard a rustle of branches. The crying grew louder, then all but died away.

  Was someone in trouble? Lost? Hurt? A small child? A woman? An attractive young woman? Danyl lurched forward, and then stopped again. The crying was clearer now. It was a raw, jagged bellow. It sounded male. And unhinged.

  He took a step backwards. Something didn’t feel right. Something terrible lay in wait for him: he was sure of it. This path was secret, yes, but it was also secluded. Danyl retreated. The crying continued, rising and falling. He turned his back on it and hurried up the path, back towards the hole in his fence.

  The crying faded. The wind agitated the trees and the parting branches revealed the looming bulk of Campbell’s tenement tower, ominous in the distance. Danyl averted his gaze from it, trying not to think about what had happened to him there, what he’d learned, what he’d seen.

&nbs
p; ‘Take my hand. Don’t look down.’

  Danyl looked down. Beneath his feet, the ladder descended to a narrow ledge. Beyond it was only the long fall to the concrete courtyard far below. He clung to the top rung, his fingers white. Campbell Walker knelt above him, extending his hand.

  Danyl took it and Campbell gripped his wrist and hauled him up onto the roof. Danyl crawled away from the edge and lay on his back with his eyes closed, trying to breathe through his nose.

  ‘Quite a view, isn’t it?’

  Danyl did not answer. Eventually he rolled onto his side and climbed to his feet and looked around.

  The roof of the tower was a flat concrete plane covered in black tar-paper, with a thick cluster of air-vents protruding from the centre. It was a crisp wintry day: drifts of mist lay about the valley and the hills. Through them he could see, faintly, the outlines of homes, the ghosts of trees. Beyond the valley lay the city, the harbour, the distant suburbs. An aeroplane droned in the clouds.

  Campbell stood before him and said, ‘Well, writer? I need an answer. You’ve seen the building. You’ve begun to comprehend the scale of what I’m doing. Will you join me?’

  It was Sunday: Danyl’s bookstore was closed, so he’d spent the afternoon touring Campbell’s tenement tower, which was empty of the scores of construction workers and technicians he’d seen on his previous visit. Campbell had showed him in through the foyer, an open and desolate space filled with discarded power tools, steel beams and pellets stacked with bags of cement mixture.

  ‘When we’re finished, these walls will all be covered with murals. Elegant, tasteful. Can you paint, writer?’

  ‘Sorry, no.’

  ‘Ah well. This way.’ Campbell led him across the foyer and through a set of double-doors into a room filled with boxes. Three camp beds were lined up along the far wall, and two figures stood beside the table in the centre of the room.

  Campbell dragged Danyl towards them. ‘Excellent. These are my disciples. I want you to meet them.’

  The disciples turned. They were both acne-scarred post-adolescents wearing T-shirts tucked into their jeans, with mobile phones and Swiss Army knives clipped to their belts. Danyl waved at them but they regarded him with open alarm. On the table behind them sat a small plastic tank filled with water. A dozen syringes lay scattered about it. They moved around the table to block Danyl’s line of sight.

  Campbell saw this too. ‘Actually, my disciples look rather busy,’ he said quickly, taking hold of Danyl’s arm and spinning him around, while Danyl craned his neck to look back. ‘Busy with something you aren’t cleared to see yet. Come. I’ll show you the rest of the building.’

  They took the service elevator. It rumbled past the second floor, which was walled off by sheets of wood covering the elevator door. ‘I’d love to show you what we’re building in there,’ Campbell said, a touch of pride in his voice. ‘But I can’t without preparing you intellectually,’ he cautioned. ‘It could damage your sanity.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  ‘You can see the biochemistry lab though. Here we are.’

  They stopped on the third floor and wandered around a series of empty, debris-filled concrete rooms, while Campbell explained their future purpose. ‘This is the prep-area. This here will be a clean room with positive air pressure to prevent contamination. This will be the autopsy bay—’

  ‘Autopsy bay?’

  ‘Obviously we’ll have to fix these leaks.’ Campbell gestured at a dripping pipe running along the ceiling and the pool of orange algae-tinged water on the floor beneath it. ‘I can’t expect my disciples to carry out proper autopsies under these conditions, ha ha.’

  ‘Ha ha. What kind of—?’

  ‘And along here will be a row of centrifuges, and a cell-culture facility just beyond that jagged hole in the floor.’

  And so they wound their way back to the elevator and continued the tour, through successive floors of gutted apartments and hallways choked with dust, ending on the roof where Campbell delivered his ultimatum. ‘Will you join me and my disciples? Or will you throw in your lot with the dregs of humanity?’

  ‘I still don’t understand what you’re doing. Or what you want me to do.’

  ‘You read your contract. There’s a role description attached.’

  ‘It just said “bard”.’

  ‘Yes. Bard. Bard. Do you know the meaning of the word?’

  ‘Weren’t they like, travelling minstrels?’

  ‘Bard is one of the oldest words in the world. It derives from the proto-Indo-European language our distant ancestors spoke six thousand years ago. It means: to raise the voice in praise. A bard would enter the service of a great lord or a mighty warrior and write songs in honour of his deeds.’

  ‘Deeds?’

  ‘I can’t reveal too much of my work here.’ Campbell walked around the rooftop. Danyl followed. ‘There are many who would stop me. Insects. Fools. When you sign your contract and are bound to me I will tell you everything—or at least, as much as you can comprehend—and you will capture my words and deeds and document them in a book, The Book of the Campbell Walker, to be published after the completion of the DoorWay Project, at my expense of course. What is your decision? You must answer now.’

  Danyl put his hand in his jacket pocket. His contract with Campbell was in there, folded inside an envelope, signed. He considered his options.

  On the one hand, Campbell’s mysterious DoorWay Project had disaster written all over it. Campbell was a megalomaniac and his project headquarters was this decaying, labyrinthine tenement building beneath him, which Danyl would live in for the duration of whatever Campbell was doing.

  On the plus side, he’d be paid to write a book, with publication guaranteed. How many aspiring authors got a chance like that? And so what if it was a disaster? This was the life he chose: the lot of a writer was to make obvious mistakes, document them and call it art. So he took the envelope from his pocket and gave it to Campbell and said, ‘I’m all yours.’

  Campbell opened the envelope and checked the signature. His eyes gleamed. ‘You’ve just changed your life for the better,’ he told Danyl, who felt as if a trapdoor had swung open beneath his feet. ‘Come.’ Campbell led him to the far side of the building. ‘I’ll show you to your quarters. You can begin immediately.’

  They stood on the western edge of the building where another ladder led down to the fire escape, which was a zigzag of wooden ledges and stairs held together by a rusty steel frame descending all the way to the second storey. ‘Your rooms are down here,’ said Campbell. ‘On the seventh floor. Of course you don’t have to reach them this way in future—the elevator or the stairs will be fine, ha ha.’

  ‘Ha.’

  Campbell stood on the top rung of the ladder, swung around and stopped, struck by a thought. ‘Are you a photographer, by any chance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Merely a writer. A pity. I need someone to capture me in image as well as deed, create a photo essay to supplement your book. I thought perhaps you could do both.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No matter. I have someone else in mind. A local girl—she works in the gallery on Aro Street. She was recommended to me by a colleague. A scientist for whom I have the highest regard. You’ll have a fellow artist to collaborate with.’

  Danyl looked past Campbell, contemplating the distant ground again. It seemed to rush towards him and telescope away at the same time. Desperately trying to focus on Campbell’s words, he replied, ‘Artist? What’s her name?’

  Verity looked up when Danyl entered the gallery. She saw his crutches and her eyes widened.

  ‘I was running,’ he explained. ‘I tore my anterior talofibular ligament.’

  ‘Poor little Danyl! Did you have go to the hospital?’

  ‘Don’t call me that. No, no hospital, but I’ve taken advice from
a specialist.’ He hobbled to the leather couch in the centre of the showroom and sat, with much wincing and sighing. He took off his backpack and put it on the coffee table, leaned his crutches beside it and set his shopping bag on the couch.

  ‘Grocery shopping? You?’ Verity came out from behind her desk at the end of the gallery, sat beside him and rummaged through his bag. ‘Let’s see what kind of wild bachelor lifestyle you’re living now. Miso paste, muesli, vitamin C, codeine, anti-inflammatories and fibre supplements. My, you’re really living the dream.’

  ‘I’m getting by. How are you coping without me? You’re not lonely?’

  Verity laughed, a little too loudly. ‘Yes, I’m so lonely. Late at night, when I’m alone in my cold bed, I wish I was back with my selfish, depressed, untrustworthy, sexless—’

  ‘All right, all right. I’m in a lot of pain here you know.’

  A comfortable silence followed. Danyl looked around the showroom. It was like every commercial art gallery: polished wooden floors, white plaster walls, diffuse lighting. There were dozens of new paintings, mostly by untalented artists he did not recognise. A landscape hung in place of pride behind the counter, an oil work by Sylvia Gold, a recently deceased local artist.

  Verity was very interested in Gold’s work and her mysterious life, of which little was known, and she’d often tried to share this interest with Danyl, inevitably when Danyl was trying to read a book, or get some sleep, or do anything other than pay attention to his girlfriend. As a result he disliked Gold’s claustrophobic, vague paintings. This one showed a group of figures standing in a clearing in the rain.

  Verity motioned towards his injured leg. ‘Is this why you never picked up your box?’

  ‘It is,’ Danyl lied. ‘Yes. Yes. I’m sorry I didn’t call you. I’ve just been delirious with pain.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at home now, resting?’

  ‘I should. But as you can see,’ he waved at the shopping bag, ‘I have to run my own errands. The, um, specialist felt that someone should look after me. Someone who cares. Someone close.’