Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  After the collapse of the DoorWay Project I was a troubled man. For the first time in my life I’d tasted failure, and even though it was due to betrayal by those I trusted and no fault of my own, the taste was bitter indeed. I was without direction. When I left your house after our final confrontation I stumbled into the darkness, adrift and alone. I wandered the hidden paths of Te Aro until I came across a comely immigrant peasant girl dressed in a red silk outfit, sitting in the middle of a clearing, weeping.

  She was new to the valley, lost and frightened. So I took pity on her wretched plight and gave her food and shelter, and in return she offered me her body, for that is how she was accustomed to rewarding kindness, and in truth it was all she had to give. But I refused, and in her shame she babbled forth a confused folk story about an evil artefact hidden somewhere in the Aro Valley.

  I humoured her and listened to her ramblings, and I detected a grain of truth beneath her superstitious gibberish. So I gleaned what I could from her story and supplemented her meagre knowledge with my own research, and gradually pieced together the story of Wolfgang Bludkraft, the Order of Thrice-Wise Hermes, and the fate of the lost artefact known as the Priest’s Soul.

  It all began at this well.

  One hundred years ago this was a working-class neighbourhood. The people who lived near here were simple folk. Labourers. Stonemasons. Carpenters. Fools. They gathered here in the mornings and evenings to gossip and fetch water, and waste away the tedious hours of their tedious lives. Then one morning when they came to the well a stranger awaited them. His name was Wolfgang Bludkraft. He was an Austrian adventurer who fled his home city of Vienna under mysterious circumstances. He was elderly, his clothes were travel-stained, and he carried with him a box wrapped in oilskins which he rested at his feet. Bludkraft greeted the visitors to the well and made polite conversation for a moment, and then he asked them a simple question. ‘What is consciousness?’

  Of course, the rabble were uneducated and ignorant, and he was forced to phrase his question in simpler terms. ‘What is the self? Who am I? When I look at my face in the mirror, what sees and what is seen?’ The rabble gave Bludkraft the same answer all fools give, that inside each of us dwells an immortal soul. It is the seat of our identity and makes our choices for good or evil, and when our bodies die it endures and lives forever.

  But Bludkraft was a soldier; he had fought in many wars. ‘I have seen men sustain grievous head wounds,’ he told the fools. ‘And when they recovered from their injuries all the memories of their lives were gone, or their personalities quite changed. If our identities are bound up with invisible, immortal souls, how could this happen?’

  The rabble asked him, ‘Does that mean that the self is merely the brain?’

  ‘It does not,’ Bludkraft replied. ‘I have seen other men shot through the skull who remained unchanged, and others who lost their sight even though their eyes still followed my hand when I waved it before them. Their brains were damaged, but their memories and true selves endured. I have seen other men struck in the back of the head by savages, and they lost the power of speech but could still read or write. This shows us that different parts of the brain perform different tasks. One part understands language, another sees, yet another part remembers.

  ‘So,’ Bludkraft demanded of the rabble, ‘if the brain is many different components performing different tasks, then what is the self? I will tell you. The self is a story the brain tells itself to explain the experience and actions of the separate parts. So the eyes see another person, the ears hear their voice and the mouth replies, and these things all happen separately, but the brain weaves them together into a single narrative, and this story is what we experience as the self. This story is our life, and when it ends, we die.’

  The worthless rabble recognised the wisdom of Bludkraft’s words. ‘Then death truly is the end,’ they said sadly. ‘Because our stories cannot exist without our minds, and when the body dies this dies too.’

  ‘The mind is the storyteller,’ Bludkraft replied. ‘The story itself is everything, the storyteller nothing.’ He bent down and lifted the box, struggling, as it seemed very heavy for its size, and held it aloft. ‘And I have found a way to transfer the story of the self into a timeless vessel so that we are no longer trapped in the feeble bodies of dying animals. Who among you would know the secret of this thing?’

  Naturally the entire herd thronged around him. From these riffraff, Bludkraft chose the most promising applicants to be his disciples, and so he formed the Order of Thrice-Wise Hermes—Hermes being the Greek god of language and stories. According to the tales told to me by the wanton young peasant girl in red silk—whose name, as you may have guessed, was Stasia—Bludkraft and his followers built a temple in which to house this box, which he referred to as the Priest’s Soul. The box was covered in complex runes, and the builders copied them onto the walls of the temple. But before the Order of Thrice-Wise Hermes could master the secrets encrypted in the runes, tragedy struck. Bludkraft vanished, the Order crumbled. The temple fell into ruin and the Priest’s Soul was lost. Its very existence passed out of human knowledge.

  Until I learned of it. I resolved to find this temple and determine the truth of these stories for myself. Many of my old disciples—my proud, faithful DoorMen—still lived in the valley, waiting for me to call them back into my service. I summoned them unto me and we searched the backwards and forgotten regions of the valley, and found the abandoned temple within a matter of days.

  I will never forget that moment. It was early springtime, cold and damp. A mist rose off the hills as we neared it, a gray concrete phantom seen in glimpses through the distant trees. What can I say of my thoughts when I first entered it? How can I make someone of your limited faculties understand?

  Consider this. Four hundred and fifty years ago Cambridge University closed down to prevent an outbreak of the plague. A young student there called Isaac Newton was forced to spend eighteen months sequestered at his mother’s farm in Woolsthorpe. During this period he invented infinitesimal calculus, developed his universal theory of gravity and posited the particle theory of light. Newton’s work during this time is regarded as the single greatest achievement of the human intellect. It laid the groundwork for his masterwork, the Principia Mathematica, which brought about the dawn of the Enlightenment.

  When I saw the carvings in the temple I knew I was looking at another Principia, or, rather, the confused fragments of one. To the uneducated they looked like a syncretism of random mystical symbols, but to I, the Campbell Walker, their meaning was obvious. They were algorithms expressed in a formal system. More importantly, they were non-deterministic algorithms dealing with the mechanisms of human thought: natural language comprehension, the subjective nature of consciousness—these are major unsolved problems in the scientific study of mind, and the solutions were hinted at in the crude carvings of the abandoned Temple of Thrice-Wise Hermes.

  But where did this knowledge come from? Not Bludkraft, surely. The man was little more than a mercenary. A tomb-robber, a thief. An occasional spy. And certainly not from the simple fools that made up the rest of the Order. No, they must have copied the algorithms from the box Bludkraft kept so close to him, the box Stasia insisted was an evil artefact of great power.

  The Priest’s Soul.

  Then I understood what the Priest’s Soul really was. Some genius, their identity lost in the abyss of time, had somehow mastered the unspeakable secrets of the human mind and recorded his wisdom, either in tablets inside the box or on the thing itself. When the Order decorated their temple they merely copied this information onto its walls, but alas, the destruction of the cult led to the ruin of the temple and the decay of the algorithms—degradation made worse by a perverted yokel named Sutcliffe Parsons, who taught at the local school and somehow stumbled across the temple on his own.

  After this bumpkin physics teacher discovered the temple—qu
ite by accident, I expect—he attempted to restore it. But his feeble undergraduate mathematics were unequal to the task, and he further confused the information encoded in the carvings. Fortunately Parsons was arrested and sent to prison for unrelated, lesser crimes—but the damage was done. The algorithms on the temple walls were corrupted beyond repair.

  The only way to recover that priceless knowledge was to find the box from which the carvings were copied. Only the Priest’s Soul itself could give me the secret of replicating the mind computationally, of transferring the story of myself outside this wretched, fragile membrane of blood and meat that is my body.

  For one year I’ve sought this artefact, and with your inadvertent help, traitor, it is finally within my grasp. Somehow you found the box of clues Parsons collected and concealed when he went to prison, and you delivered them into my hands. And with the information therein, combined with the letter the peasant girl Stasia tried to keep from me, and now the final, secret letter you rendered unto me today, I have deciphered all the clues and determined the final resting place of the Priest’s Soul.

  ‘Where is it then?’ asked Danyl.

  ‘See if you can reason it out for yourself, traitor. What were the clues on the back of your letter?’

  ‘There weren’t any,’ Danyl replied. ‘Just that the treasure was underground.’

  ‘And what did the photograph on the front depict?’

  ‘It showed Bludkraft and Anna, his Deputy High Heirophant.’ Danyl scratched his head, trying to remember. ‘They were in my back garden,’ he added. ‘Standing beside a large hole in the—’ He stopped. He looked down at the mud. He blinked. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh, indeed. The SSS have been excavating your garden all afternoon and have discovered a structure buried beneath it—a sealed chamber of brick and cast-iron that my experts tell me date back to the early twentieth century. As we speak they are clearing away the last of the earth surrounding it. It’s so delicious. A hidden artefact of unspeakable power has been right under your nose for the past year, but because you’re a lowly worm crawling down there in the darkness you were too blind to see it.

  ‘And so I take my leave of you now, traitor. There is much to be done. For tonight, when the moon sets I will enter that sealed chamber and take possession of the Priest’s Soul, and tomorrow the day will dawn upon a new world.’

  His own back garden. How humiliating.

  There was no excuse, Danyl rebuked himself. He really should have seen that. Maybe his IQ was really only 105.

  Time passed. The parabola of moonlight at the top of the well shifted and dissolved. The moon was setting. Verity wasn’t coming to save him. Nobody was.

  Which meant the Priest’s Soul would soon be in Campbell’s fell grasp. What would he find inside it? An empty box? Tablets? A weapon? Power, for good or evil? When Campbell opened it, would his face melt and his eyeballs drain from their sockets? Would he suddenly loom over the valley, miles tall? Or would the stars go out and the fabric of the universe tear apart like wet tissue? Such things were impossible, Danyl knew—but Stasia’s healing powers were also impossible, and they were real and linked to the Priest’s Soul. Who knew what it was capable of?

  He brooded on Campbell’s tale. How much of it was true? If human consciousness was just a story, then what was he, as a writer? A story telling a story? What did that even mean? He squatted lower in the mud and scratched his genitals, and leaned against the side of the well.

  He closed his eyes.

  Footsteps. Again. Danyl woke from his doze and jumped up. ‘In here,’ he called out. ‘Help!’

  The footsteps were slow and measured. Someone was picking their way carefully along the trail in the dark. They paused when Danyl cried out and then resumed, unhurried.

  ‘Who is that?’ Danyl felt relief, but also fear. Who approached? Why didn’t they answer? Was it Campbell again? Some local out for a stroll in the trees in the middle of the night? He called, ‘Verity?’ No reply. ‘Campbell?’

  The footsteps grew louder, closer.

  ‘Steve?’

  They stopped at the well. Danyl could hear breathing, slow and laboured.

  ‘Stasia?’

  Laughter: low, amused; malign. A man’s voice, ancient and cruel, said, ‘I don’t think Stasia is coming.’ He laid a particular emphasis on her name.

  Danyl felt a chill wind blow through him. He knew that voice. The owner of the box. The old man with the cane. He called out, ‘Who are you?’

  The voice replied, ‘We have met before, thief. My name is Sutcliffe Parsons.’

  33

  The Satanist’s Riddle

  ‘You are not Sutcliffe Parsons.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. You’re an impostor. Sutcliffe Parsons is in prison. Fact.’

  ‘And how do you know this?’

  ‘We checked with the Department of Corrections,’ Danyl replied, peering up at the stars. ‘Parsons was denied parole. He can’t apply again until next year.’

  ‘That is correct,’ the voice replied. It echoed around the well. It curled and lingered in the depths, and ebbed and whispered in Danyl’s mind. ‘But there are many things in this world that you do not understand, thief trapped in well, and the parole board regulations are one of them. I was released one week ago. You see, in certain circumstances a prisoner may be granted compassionate parole and set free at any time.’

  ‘What sort of circumstances?’

  ‘If one is pregnant, say, or diagnosed with a terminal illness.’

  ‘Compassionate parole! But that explains everything,’ Danyl said, excited. It was the real Sutcliffe Parsons, Satanist and criminal! The man at the dark heart of all of these mysteries. Dozens of questions ran through Danyl’s mind, and he realised he was thinking out loud. ‘That’s why the box was on your porch. You must have sent it into storage when you were convicted and then had it delivered—’ He stopped, reviewed Parsons’ last sentence, then said, ‘Oh. You got out on the terminally-ill option.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘The sympathy of a thief at the bottom of a well is of enormous comfort to me.’

  There was a strained silence. Clouds drifted by overhead: monstrous, floodlit ghosts. They were, Danyl observed, incredibly beautiful. He wondered, how many more times would the dying Satanist look up and see the clouds at night? Then again, how many more times would he? It was only because of his imprisonment that he saw them now. He cleared his throat. ‘How long do you have?’

  ‘Months, perhaps. But in practical terms, barely a few weeks. My condition is deteriorating. I am heavily medicated most of the time. Confused, disorientated. I have these lucid intervals for a few hours at best.’

  ‘Why did you come back here? Shouldn’t you be in a hospital?’

  ‘It is hard to find good medical care, especially when one is a convicted sex offender with no money. And I have unfinished business in this valley. Business I have almost concluded.’

  ‘The Priest’s Soul,’ Danyl replied. ‘Is that why you’re here? You think it can cure you? If that’s your plan, you’re too late. A man named Campbell Walker knows where the Priest’s Soul is. If you let me out we might be able to stop him.’

  Laughter tumbled down the well. ‘But I do not want to stop him.’

  ‘You’re on his side?’

  Parsons laughed again, then he coughed and the laughter died, his heavy, laboured breathing ebbed into the stone chamber like waves. Eventually he said, ‘I have an evil reputation in this valley, thief. That is why I take my walks at night. I am at my most lucid then, and the darkness hides my identity.’ He coughed again. ‘One sees many things at night: mysteries, foul deeds. Secrets concealed by day. Tonight, for example, walking along Devon Street, I saw men dressed in black robes digging a hole in the back garden of a house. They had uncovered a
sealed chamber. What do you make of that?’

  ‘That’s my house. That’s where the Priest’s Soul is hidden.’

  ‘Tell me, thief. What do you think the Priest’s Soul is?’

  Danyl groaned, exasperated. ‘I don’t know exactly. OK? We don’t have time for this.’

  ‘I have time.’

  ‘It’s some kind of ancient artefact. It’s kept inside a box or a chest. There may be carvings on it.’ Danyl tried to remember the other clues he’d heard from Pearl, Campbell, Stasia. ‘It may be a weapon or have healing properties. Or it could just be information. The secret wisdom of the ages.’

  ‘Secret wisdom of the ages?’ More laughter.

  Danyl rolled his eyes. Satanists were such know-it-alls. ‘I told you I didn’t know. Do you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Uh huh. You mean you know in an abstract sense, like you know it contains power, or knowledge? Or do you actually know something tangible?’

  ‘I know exactly what is inside the Priest’s Soul.’

  ‘Oh.’ Danyl absorbed this information. ‘Will you tell me?’

  ‘What if I offered you a choice? Would you rather be freed from this well or learn the secret?’

  Danyl sat back on his haunches and considered this dilemma. Which was more important to him? Wisdom or freedom? The answer was obvious. He called up to Parsons, ‘I choose to be freed from the well.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because anything you told me about the Priest’s Soul might be false and I’d never even know it. But if you set me free then I’m free to seek out the true secret of the Priest’s Soul for myself. Which I can’t really do while I’m down here.’

  ‘That is very sensible,’ said Parsons. ‘You are more intelligent than I thought.’