Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ Danyl sighed. ‘But of course there’s no one.’

  Verity looked at him with a mixture of sympathy and suspicion. ‘You’ve really hurt your leg?’

  ‘Of course. Who do you think you’re dealing with?’

  ‘I know who I’m dealing with. Did your doctor give you those crutches? They look like antiques.’

  Danyl shifted uncomfortably and replied, ‘I’ll show you my wound.’ He leaned forward, rolled up his trouser-leg and pulled up his sock. The skin around his ankle was purple and red, and swollen as if it had been pumped full of air. He hadn’t properly inspected his injury before, and he recoiled in shock at the sight of it.

  Verity said, ‘It just looks like a sprain to me.’

  ‘There’s massive internal damage. The pain—’

  ‘OK.’ She stood up and smoothed out her skirt. ‘Fine. I’ll visit you tomorrow. I’ll bring you some food. Text me if you need anything else.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m busy today.’ She looked out the window, distracted by movement on the road. ‘Oh look, the freaks are back.’

  Freaks? Danyl followed her gaze. A white van pulled up opposite the shop, reflections of the street glittering in its opaque black windows. The side-door slid open and a host of hooded figures in black wizard robes climbed out. They fanned out in all directions, some heading up Epuni Street, others down Aro towards the market.

  ‘Don’t they look ridiculous? Who do you think they are?’

  ‘They’re searching for someone,’ Danyl said, with a dread realisation of who that someone might be.

  ‘They were here yesterday as well,’ said Verity. ‘Scouring Aro Street all afternoon.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’ve gone pale. They’re not after you, are they?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps. I think they work for Campbell,’ he added bleakly.

  ‘Campbell? But his disciples all abandoned him when the DoorWay Project ended.’

  ‘Maybe he has new disciples. Or maybe the old ones are back. It’s hard to tell under the robes.’

  ‘What would they want with you?’ There was an edge to her voice. ‘You haven’t upset Campbell?’

  Danyl flashed back to the basement of the tower, urinating through the window of the secret campervan, laughing to himself in the darkness. ‘I haven’t talked to him for months,’ he replied, choosing his words carefully. ‘I’m probably just being paranoid. Nevertheless I think I’ll go out the back way.’

  Verity still looked suspicious, but she helped him with his crutches and backpack, and led him around the counter and into the workshop.

  This was a large dimly lit room. Workbenches ran along three walls: they were piled high with paintings and photographs, all in the process of being framed, or restored, or packaged up and dispatched to their new owners.

  Danyl loved the smell of this room: polish and varnish and sawdust and glue. Being back here triggered a flood of happy memories from his early days with Verity, looking at the paintings, and talking, and laughing, and the time they had sex on the workbench and Verity got glue in her hair, which soured her on the experience and she refused to repeat it, even on his birthday.

  She opened the back door which led onto a narrow alleyway running behind the shops. ‘See you tomorrow, little Danyl.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘Sorry about your leg.’ She didn’t sound very sorry.

  ‘Goodbye, Verity.’ Danyl limped past her with massive dignity, and then stopped as a thought struck him. ‘One last question. Does the name S Parsons mean anything to you? Maybe someone who lives around here?’

  Verity knew all of the artists in Te Aro and through them she picked up gossip and secrets and insights into the hidden history of the valley. She considered the question and replied, ‘Do you mean Sutcliffe Parsons? The Satanist?’

  ‘Sutcliffe Parsons!’ Danyl nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes. Yes! I knew I knew the name.’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  He fluttered his hands dismissively. It was his policy never to divulge any extraneous information to Verity. Telling her things only upset her. ‘I have some items of his.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just a box with some books and papers.’

  She said, ‘I think you should burn them.’

  The men in black robes were everywhere: striding around, heads covered, their faces in shadow. A group of them stood on the corner of Devon and Aro, conferring in a dark circle.

  He would never make it past them if he stuck to the streets, so Danyl made his way down the alleyway, back around the market and behind the loading zone to the park. He slipped into the trees and hurried towards the old access road, and as he went he thought about Sutcliffe Parsons.

  Sutcliffe Parsons, the disgraced Satanist. It all happened before Danyl arrived in the valley—about five years back, he guessed. Parsons was a teacher at Te Aro School, and he had an affair with an underage student. He was arrested and charged, and pleaded not guilty on grounds of religious freedom. He was a black magician, he protested, and deflowering minors was an obligation placed on him by his faith.

  The Satanist community in Te Aro was small (the predominant faiths in the valley were Theravada Buddhism and libertarianism) but vocal, and they rallied around Parsons, defending him as a victim of religious intolerance, and the case became briefly newsworthy until the judge suppressed all coverage of the trial due to the age of the victim. Eventually Parsons was convicted, sentenced and imprisoned—and now, obviously, he was free, and back in the valley.

  And Danyl had accidentally stolen his box.

  Should he return it? It did belong to Parsons, after all. But what was Danyl’s moral obligation to a Satanist? What if he kept the box? How dangerous was Parsons? Oh, he was an ex-convict black magician, certainly—but he was also, Danyl recalled, rather old. How formidable could he be?

  He grappled with these questions as he made his way up the old Devon road. His progress was slow: the weeds snatched at his crutches; the sun and trees conspired to cast sequential shadows in bands across the path, so he was repeatedly dazzled by sunlight before stumbling back into shadow, and this distracted him so that he didn’t notice the absence of birdsong, or remember the sinister crying sound he’d heard earlier on this path, or hear those same cries now, growing louder as he neared them, until it was too loud to ignore and he was upon the source of the sound.

  It was a man. He sat in the centre of the clearing, beneath the shade of a totara tree. He faced away from Danyl, thick sobs wracking his body as he rocked back and forth. Danyl walked towards him, shading his eyes. A twig broke beneath his foot, and the man turned.

  He wore a black robe with silver trim. The cowl was pulled back: he had straggly black hair, a pointed nose and red-rimmed eyes.

  It was the Campbell Walker.

  ‘I want you to imagine this room.’ Campbell stood and held out his arms. ‘In eleven dimensions.’

  He paused for effect, then smiled and shook his head. ‘You can’t, of course. Not even I can. Our brains evolved in a three-dimensional world, dealing with three-dimensional objects operating in three-dimensional space. They’re not equipped to operate outside that context. Consider the world as it is, our global civilisation. It is complex, yes. Strange, yes. Unpredictable.’ Another smile. ‘Perhaps, to some. But the things that happen in it are not unimaginable, by definition, because they are driven by humans, so the human mind must be able to conceive them. Some areas of human enquiry, however, are unimaginable. Theoretical physics postulates that our universe is made up of eleven dimensions. Because our brains can’t conceive of what eleven dimensional space looks like we can only model it mathematically, or describe it using clumsy metaphors. Mere humans could never understand events playing out in an eleven-dimensional context. Are you getting all this down, writer?’

  Danyl nodded misera
bly. They sat at the ‘dining table’ in the ‘mess hall’, a large room on the sixth floor of Campbell’s building, created a few days earlier by Campbell and his disciples when they knocked out a wall separating two apartments, and then cleared away all the resulting debris when it turned out the wall was structural.

  The dining table—four long planks of wood balanced atop piles of bricks—groaned under a banquet of junk food: bowls overflowing with potato chips, a dozen bottles of pastel-coloured soda drinks, Hawaiian pizzas the size of car tyres. Danyl sat at the end of this table, taking notes while Campbell talked and his disciples ate, gorging themselves on the disgusting feast before them.

  He had moved into the building a week ago, and so far this was his only responsibility as bard: attending mealtimes and transcribing Campbell’s rants. This was the book he had been commissioned to write: The Book of the Campbell Walker—a series of deranged monologues.

  ‘Pay close heed to my words, writer,’ Campbell lectured. ‘It’s not enough for you to record them, like some dumb secretary in stockings and heels with lipstick and bunned hair. You need to understand them if you are ever to comprehend Project DoorWay.’

  Danyl tried to look as though he was paying attention and not planning to slip out of the building and leave the Aro Valley that night to go back to the bookshop and beg to have his old job back.

  ‘Look out that window, writer,’ Campbell commanded. ‘What shape is that cloud?’

  Danyl looked. ‘It’s shaped like, like a potato.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Campbell turned to his disciples. There were now six of them, indistinguishable from each other. ‘The writer sees the world as a poet, or an animal. Everything is symbolism. Metaphor.’ He gestured to his followers. ‘But we are educated. We look at the world and perceive the hidden reality of physical systems and mathematical objects. Consider the roads and the power lines and the phone network. We understand that these are really mathematical structures called connected graphs, and that any distributed network can be represented as a graph. If we want to know the best way to move cars, or electricity, or information around a network we use algorithms to find the optimum way to do so. We can even construct eleven-dimensional graphs if we use computers to model them. Now I’ll let you in on a secret.’ Campbell tapped the side of his head. ‘Your brain is a connected graph, a mathematical device for receiving, analysing and storing information. The difference is that your brain wasn’t designed, it evolved through natural selection, a partly random process. The end result is that your brain doesn’t store or process information as efficiently as it could, and it can’t think outside three dimensions. Our brains cannot perceive the universe as it truly is. Photographer!’ he barked. ‘Can we get a picture of this discussion?’

  Danyl turned. The photographer leaned against the far wall, as distant from the table and its occupants as was possible while remaining in the room. She wore a simple white dress; her hair was a black curtain falling forward over her face. She raised her camera, took a picture and slouched back against the wall.

  Danyl’s gaze lingered on her. The photographer’s name was Verity. She had moved into the building two days earlier, and she lived in an unconverted apartment on the same floor as him. Danyl was eager to strike up a friendship with Verity. She was pretty, and the only person in the building he did not hate. Moreover, yesterday morning he saw her lean over the landing on the eastern stairway and spit on one of Campbell’s disciples as they walked up the stairs to breakfast, and Danyl’s heart soared at the sight. She was a kindred spirit!

  But when he approached her she was distant, hostile. Also, just that afternoon someone had spat on him from above when he was walking through the courtyard, and he suspected Verity. He waved at her now. She looked at him and looked away again.

  ‘But we are on the verge of a great gust in the wind of human affairs!’ Campbell’s nasal voice filled the room. ‘Humanity as a species is about to undergo a radical transformation from evolved bipedal mammals to . . . something else. Something that can truly perceive reality in a way that the rabble who form the common bulk of humanity cannot. And when you truly perceive something—’ Campbell bared his teeth and held up an empty styrofoam cup. ‘You become its master.’ He tightened his grip on the cup and it crumpled within his fist. Campbell’s gaze swept the table. His voice dropped to a lower, conspirational pitch. ‘But who will be the first to achieve this breakthrough? Will it be a great research centre? A corporation? A nation-state? Or . . . someone else?’

  He picked up another cup and crushed it in his free hand.

  ~

  The meal ended. Campbell and his disciples huddled into a tight group and Danyl was dismissed. As he left he noticed Verity had already slipped away, unnoticed.

  He tucked his notebook into his back pocket and made his way up the stairs; as he walked he considered his options. Should he flee the building now, or wait until dark? Should he steal the laptop Campbell gave him to write on? Should he leave a note? He reached the seventh floor and stopped to catch his breath.

  Wait until dark, he decided. Take the laptop. Leave a note.

  He left the landing and made his way through the maze of corridors to his apartment. Rounding the final corner he ran into Verity walking the other way: she must have become lost trying to find her own room. She looked distracted, flustered, and she almost walked into Danyl before he steadied her arms and said, ‘Hey now!’ In his mind that seemed like a cool, casual thing to say.

  Verity recoiled from his touch. She looked angry: he must have scared her. Her mouth opened and then closed again, and she pushed past him, rounded the corner and walked away. Ice-cold.

  Well, the hell with her. Danyl walked to the end of the hall and opened the door to his apartment. In a few hours he would leave Verity and Campbell and this horrible old building behind forever. He slammed the door shut and contemplated his apartment.

  When Campbell bought the tenement tower he evicted all of the previous residents, some of whom had lived there for decades, including the previous owners of Danyl’s apartment who had not redecorated since the early 1970s. The interior decor was the stuff of nightmares: orange-and-yellow paisley wallpaper swirled and peeled from the walls, and a random distribution of pillars painted red and white with vertical strips stretched from the matching striped carpet, which reeked of cat urine, to the claustrophobically low ceiling.

  Danyl hurried through the lounge, trying not to look at it while still avoiding the pillars, and entered the kitchen, which was the least horrible room. He sat at the table, poured himself a glass of mineral water—the tap water in the building was undrinkable—opened his laptop and began his letter.

  To the Campbell Walker,

  I regret to inform you that I am unable to continue in my position as Bard of Project DoorWay.

  Danyl sat back, considered this sentence and smiled. The situation was pretty funny when he stopped to think about it: Bardship. Campbell and his disciples. Verity. The building. He should write a story about it one day.

  Danyl blinked.

  He should write a book.

  He shot back the dregs of his water, stood up and paced around the kitchen. Yes. Yes. He wanted to write a novel, he’d been waiting for inspiration and source material, and now here it was! He sat down at the table, deleted his note and wrote: ‘The Book of Danyl’. He grinned and poured himself another glass of mineral water. And wrote.

  And wrote.

  Danyl was not an obsessive, over-dedicated writer. He usually managed only a couple of paragraphs before he got bored or something distracted him. But as soon as he wrote about Campbell and Verity the ideas kept coming, flowing through the keyboard and onto the screen, becoming more abstract, grand, and soon a whole novel unfolded in his mind. He wrote all evening and long into the night. Character, plot, themes—the hours flew by, and the dawn lit the distant hemisphere of the world before he finally stood up, e
lated and spent. He didn’t have it all—not quite yet. The central idea of the story eluded him. It was a concept he couldn’t grasp, couldn’t articulate to himself. It slipped away as he wrote. It would come back.

  Someone knocked on his door.

  Danyl frowned. It was Campbell, presumably, or one of his minions. He saved his file, giving it an innocuous name; then he closed his laptop, walked through the lounge to his front door and opened it. Verity stood in the hall.

  ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’ She looked nervous. ‘I saw your light was on.’

  ‘Hey now!’ Danyl beamed at her. Verity featured prominently in his book as a tedious shrew who engaged in an explicit, demeaning sex scene with the hero. ‘Actually I was just thinking about you. You’re not disturbing me at all.’

  A wan smile. ‘I just thought I’d check in. Your light was on all night.’

  Now how did she know that? There wasn’t any reason for her to walk by his door. He broadened his smile and said, ‘I’m fine. Couldn’t be better.’

  ‘Great.’ She still looked apprehensive. Danyl felt there was something going on, something he should notice, or say, but his lack of sleep caught up with him now, fogging his thoughts. He yawned, and Verity said, ‘I’ll leave you alone. Oh, I almost forgot. I’m going to a party this afternoon. Do you—?’

  ‘Party?’ He yawned again.

  ‘It’s just a barbecue for a friend. He’s leaving the country.’

  He snapped his mouth shut, terminating his yawn. Was Verity asking him out? What was happening here? He was struck again by how pretty she was. She was waiting for an answer. Say something. He said, ‘Hey now. I mean, that sounds great. I mean, yes. Thanks.’

  She smiled and they agreed to meet in the foyer of the building later that day. She gave him a shy wave as she turned, and he waved back and closed the door.

  Did Danyl have a date with Verity? He was fairly sure he did. Maybe she wasn’t so bad. If the date went well he’d consider rewriting that degrading sex scene, maybe frame it in a more tasteful light. He went into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, fumbling with his socks, unsuccessfully, and then flopped back with a sigh.