Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  ‘He’s not a great man,’ Danyl replied, speaking a low, soothing voice. ‘He’s evil. He lied to you.’

  ‘You will not speak ill of him again.’ Stasia walked around the table, her eyes switching from Parsons to Danyl to Steve. Danyl and Steve shuffled away from her, keeping the table between them.

  ‘Remember the stories your grandmother told you,’ Danyl urged her. ‘Wolfgang Bludkraft disappeared after a fire in a doctor’s house.’ He pointed to the sagging roof, the peeling walls. ‘This house was owned by a doctor. It burned down in 1918, the year the Order of Thrice-Wise Hermes vanished from existence.’ Now Danyl pointed at Parsons, whose eyes seemed to flicker into life. ‘He knows this and he kept it from you.’

  A low growling sound emerged from Parsons. His face was blank, his body slumped, but he emitted a faint feral snarl, like a dying child’s toy.

  ‘You upset him.’

  ‘The truth upsets him. The paintings in your grandmother’s campervan show the doctor’s old house aflame, and a man sheltering beneath it in an underground chamber. Do you remember? Is that why Parsons had you sell the van—so you wouldn’t see the picture and make the link?’

  Parsons’ growl rose in pitch.

  Danyl ignored him, his eyes fixed on Stasia. ‘So you wouldn’t realise the Priest’s Soul is hidden in this very house?’

  Parsons leaped from his chair. He fumbled on the bench, scattering the kitchen implements, and stumbled towards Danyl, a steak knife in his hand. Danyl raised his arms and retreated before this demented onslaught. Stasia watched, impassive. Steve cowered in the corner.

  Parsons slashed at Danyl’s hands. Blood splattered the bare light bulb. The Satanist gave a hideous, dry laughing sound, and Danyl roared in pain with each cut. Then Parsons slipped, his knife-hand went wide and Danyl grappled him, the blood from his palms soaking Parsons’ shirt. He punched the old man in the stomach and threw him back against the table.

  ‘Sutcliffe!’ Stasia’s red-rimmed eyes went cold and hard. She sprang across the room and lifted Danyl into the air, sending him flying back into the pantry-shelf, which fell forwards when he collapsed to the floor. Packets of oatmeal split open and poured over him; tin cans rained onto the linoleum and rolled across the kitchen, their metallic rattling filling the sudden and terrible silence.

  Stasia ran to Parsons. ‘Did he hurt you, my starets?’

  Parsons raised a shaking hand and pointed at Danyl, who lay dazed on the floor. His eyes narrowed with malice. He whispered to Stasia, ‘Finish him.’

  Stasia moved with deadly certainty. She picked up a heavy, cast-iron skillet and advanced on Danyl, raising it above her head. He held up a feeble, bloody hand then, helpless to stop her, let it fall, and closed his eyes waiting for the final blow.

  ‘Stop.’

  Danyl opened his eyes. Steve, cowering in the corner, was pointing to the far wall. ‘Look,’ he said.

  The fallen shelves revealed a clumsily sawed hole opening onto a chamber, into which the bloody light bulb cast a stained and murky radiance, revealing the top rungs of a ladder leading underground.

  43

  The unspeakable secret

  The skillet dropped to the floor.

  Stasia cast her gaze around the room. She pointed at a bare section of the wall beside the sink. ‘He moved shelves,’ she said. ‘When I visit yesterday morning they were over there. Hole in wall is new today.’

  Danyl sat up and brushed the oatmeal from his hair. He tore a shred from the hem of his kimono and wrapped it around his bleeding hand. ‘Parsons must have discovered it last night. He moved the shelves because he didn’t want you to know he’d found the Priest’s Soul.’

  Stasia advanced on the hole. She grabbed Danyl’s ankle and dragged him out of her way then kicked the shelves to one side, crouched down and examined the tiny space.

  ‘Footsteps in dirt.’ She pointed. ‘Recent.’ Just inside the hole, tucked to one side was a large plastic suitcase. She tugged it towards her and flicked open the lid: it was filled with clothes.

  ‘You pack to leave.’ She turned to Parsons, her tears gone, her voice icy. ‘Why pack suitcase? Why move shelves? Why hide from me?’

  Parsons coughed and drooled.

  ‘He deceived you,’ Danyl said. ‘He’s been down there. He found the priest hole and climbed inside it, but then the pain overcame him, and he had to return and take his medication. He was planning to leave when he was lucid again, planning to seize the Priest’s Soul and flee the valley, leaving you behind. It’s revenge, Stasia. He blames you for sending him to prison.’

  ‘Don’t speak.’ Stasia addressed Danyl but closed on Parsons, who sat wheezing in his chair. His hands shook. He coughed again and whispered something unintelligible. ‘Is this true?’ she demanded. ‘Is Soul real? Did you find? Would you leave me?’

  Parsons croaked, ‘Don’t go down there.’ His dry voice trembled.

  Stasia leaned forward and pressed his hand between hers. ‘What is down there? Why you hide?’

  ‘I was—’ He fell forward in a fit of coughing. ‘I was protecting you. Don’t go down there.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Parsons’ eyes glazed with horror. He whispered, ‘There are hundreds of them.’ Stasia tipped his head back and looked directly into his eyes. He met her gaze and whispered, ‘I love you.’

  She smiled at him. She brushed a strand of hair from his head and stroked his face. ‘You are liar.’

  Her hand closed around his throat. Parsons’ eyes widened in shock. She lifted him from the chair and tossed him backwards. He flew across the room and crashed into the table, splitting it beneath him. Thousands of multicoloured pills flew through the air. Parsons lay in the splintered ruins, motionless for a second, then began to shake. His limbs trembled; a throttled choking sound struggled in the back of his throat.

  Steve rolled Parsons onto his side, resting his head on his outstretched arm. His mouth and hands still twitched.

  Danyl said, ‘Did he have a stroke?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He’s breathing but I don’t think he’s conscious.’

  ‘Fools.’ Stasia’s voice was thick with hatred. ‘Leave him be. He should die here, alone.’

  ‘We can’t just abandon him,’ Danyl said. ‘My blood is all over his shirt. If we just leave him here and he dies it might look suspicious.’

  ‘Hssst.’ Steve’s phone was wedged between his shoulder and his ear. They heard the tiny babble of a voice answering, and then Steve. ‘Hi, my name is Steve. Hey, pretty good, thanks. I need an ambulance. I’m in the home of an elderly Satanist and I think he’s had a stroke.’

  Danyl and Stasia waited while Steve gave the address of the house and then answered questions for the emergency dispatcher. ‘I don’t know how old he is. Previous history? I think he has cancer. Physical strain? I guess so. He was punched then thrown onto a table. Why? Well, that’s complicated. Is he injured? I can’t say. He’s covered in blood but I’m not sure if any of it’s his. Really? You’re sure? OK.’

  He disconnected the call. ‘They’re sending an ambulance and a police car.’

  ‘Police car?’ Danyl exploded. ‘Oh, that’s just great. Why did you tell them about the blood?’

  ‘What’s the problem? He attacked you. We haven’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘I’m wanted by the police! How will we explain why we’re here? What if they see the hole? They’ll go down the ladder! They’ll find the Priest’s Soul! They’ll stick it in a warehouse someplace! We’ll never find out what it is!’

  ‘Why would they put it in a warehouse?’

  ‘Because that’s what they do with things like that!’ Danyl ran his blood-soaked hand through his hair. ‘We need to be calm,’ he said. ‘Collaborate. Get our stories straight.’ He looked around the room. ‘Where’s Stasia?’

  The door leading
to the hall swung shut. Danyl flung it open: Stasia was almost at the end of the hall. ‘Wait! Where are you going?’

  Stasia turned. The light caught her red eyes and gleamed on the folds of her red silk robe. ‘I leave now,’ she replied. ‘There is nothing more for me here.’

  ‘But we need you to stay behind and explain things to the police. You owe me.’

  ‘Owe you? You have cost me everything. I hope you die in prison.’

  ‘You can’t go,’ Danyl pleaded. ‘The Priest’s Soul is almost within our grasp. If you stay and smooth things over I’ll split it with you. Deal?’

  ‘I have lost my wise man, my beloved. Everything I cared for is gone. Priest’s Soul means nothing to me.’

  ‘How can you say that when you don’t know what it is?’

  ‘Because I know what it is not. Goodbye forever.’

  ‘Stasia?’ He watched her walk down the hall. She struggled with the copper pipe obstructing the far end, then squeezed past it and stumbled; a flickering red wraith disappearing into the darkness. The sound of sobbing floated back through the dead air.

  Steve clasped Danyl’s shoulder. ‘Let her go, buddy. Something tells me she’ll be all right.’

  Danyl hesitated. Should he give chase? No, they didn’t have time. He grabbed Steve’s arm and pulled him across the kitchen. The light bulb still swayed overhead, giving the room a feeling of motion, like the cabin of a ship sinking into lightless gulfs. ‘Here’s the plan. I go down the hole, find the Priest’s Soul and then we’ll use it to escape. Meanwhile, you stay at the top. If the police arrive, signal me and then stall them.’ He knelt before the entrance. ‘Help me through.’

  The room behind the wall was small. The floor was bare earth. A pile of excavated dirt sat shovelled into a corner: stacked atop it lay a jumble of fire-blackened red bricks and a charred wooden trapdoor.

  They peered into the hole. It was a deep, narrow pit. Danyl swallowed. He called out, ‘Hello?’

  There was no echo. He lay on his belly and lowered his legs into the shaft. His feet found purchase on the ladder. Steve handed him the miner’s torch. Danyl strapped it to his head and switched it on. He met Steve’s eyes. They both nodded seriously, then Danyl looked down and began his descent.

  The ladder was wooden. Old. He could grip only with his right hand—his left hand was bandaged and still bleeding. Some of the rungs were missing, and at those points he was forced to brace himself against the left side of the shaft and shimmy down.

  Then he reached a long gap in the rungs—the next one was visible but too far down to reach. He wedged himself against the wall, shrugged off his kimono and tied a sleeve to the last rung before the gap. Then he pressed his feet against the wall, gripped the kimono tightly and walked backwards down the shaft. The silk made tiny clicking sounds as the seams tore under his weight, while his feet kicked around for the next section of the ladder. He glanced down. The beam from the torch lit up the distant ground. It was a long way to fall.

  He reached the next rung. He climbed down, clinging to the distended silk kimono until he could grab onto the bottom section of the frame. He caught his breath then called up to Steve. ‘There’s a break in the ladder. See if you can find some rope. Maybe some wire, so we can pull the Priest’s Soul up the shaft.’

  Steve’s voice was clear and calm. ‘Actually, I’ve been thinking. Maybe we should revise our plan.’

  ‘Revise it how?’

  ‘Basically, my thoughts are that instead of staying here we go home.’

  ‘Go? Now? That’s absurd. We can’t leave without the Priest’s Soul.’

  ‘We have enough data to postulate what the Priest’s Soul probably is. We don’t actually need to find out.’

  ‘But we’re so close. We’re right here!’

  ‘I’m also worried about the ethics of this situation,’ Steve replied. ‘The police are coming, and as a psychologist I have an obligation not to be implicated in an assault on an elderly Satanist.’

  ‘The police?’ Danyl laughed. ‘The police are nothing! Once we have the Priest’s Soul we won’t be accountable to human standards of justice or morality. The law won’t be able to touch us.’ He modulated his voice to sound inspiring and noble. ‘We can’t leave now. Not after everything we’ve been through. Everything we’ve sacrificed.’ He squinted towards the circle of light high above. ‘You’ve already left, haven’t you? I’m talking to nobody.’ He waited. He nodded, sighed and continued his descent.

  The shaft led to a narrow room with a low roof. The floor was bare clay. The walls were stone: smooth, dry. A small, steel-framed bed stood by the near wall. The mattress had long rotted to tatters. A human skeleton lay on the shreds, curled into a ball.

  A steel chest sat on the floor in the far corner of the room. The Priest’s Soul.

  It was smaller than Danyl had imagined. It had no carvings, no inscriptions. It looked sturdy. Durable. Real. Yet a cloud of infinite possibilities swarmed about it. He took a breath to savour the moment. He had made it. He’d won.

  And yet, he was afraid. He remembered Stasia’s story in which the Priest’s Soul was an artefact of great evil, and he remembered Sutcliffe Parsons’ cryptic warning: Don’t go down there. There are hundreds of them. But he also felt a glorious sense of possibility. Horrible things could happen, yes, but also wonderful things. Unimaginable things. He had made all the right choices. Although they had often seemed like disasters at the time they had brought him here, to this moment. He had beaten them all: Campbell, Stasia, even Parsons. Soon he would use the Priest’s Soul to escape the well and the police and return to Verity in triumph. He sighed happily.

  He regarded the skeleton on the bed. Wolfgang Bludkraft, High Hierophant. Here lies. When the government’s agents were at the threshold, he hid down here, bringing the Priest’s Soul with him. His believers bought him food and water, and revered his wisdom. How did it end? One day the person who fed him was sick, the next day no one came? Was he still alive, Danyl wondered, when the neighbours set fire to the house above?

  Danyl put Bludkraft out of his mind. It was time. He crossed the room to the chest, knelt before it and laid his hands upon it. He felt the legion of possibilities within flicker and collapse down to a single, physical reality. He opened the lid and the final secrets were revealed.

  Danyl sat back on his knees and stared. He laughed. He glanced back at the skeleton and laughed again. Now he understood.

  Sutcliffe Parsons was no Satanist. And Wolfgang Bludkraft was no High Hierophant. Parsons pretended to be an occultist to distract people; throw them off the scent. He wanted to divert attention from the Order of Thrice-Wise Hermes and their secrets.

  And Bludkraft? Who was he? No one would ever know. His true motives were lost to history: degraded into the chalk-coloured dust lying in the hollow caverns of his skull.

  Danyl reached into the chest. He took an object from it and held it to the light. It was heavy. Cold to the touch. He turned it, inspecting it.

  It was a gold bar: solid, smooth, about the size of a packet of cigarettes. On one side was an engraving of a man with a large moustache, holding a sceptre in one hand and a globe in the other. On the opposite face was a coat of arms flanked by angels, and the date inscribed: 1914.

  He shone his light into the interior of the chest and laughed harder. There were hundreds of them.

  Danyl’s laugh faltered. He felt something in his ankle: an itching, discomforting sensation. His fingers tightened on the gold bar and he glanced down, and then hissed in pain, as once again he felt the ligaments in his ankle twitch and writhe, sending bolts of agony shuddering through his leg.

  He fell to the ground, his face rubbing into the cool earth. The torch smashed against the edge of the steel chest and shattered, and darkness flooded the tiny chamber. He cried out into the void, his fingers scrabbling in the dirt, while in his other hand h
e clutched the final secret of the Priest’s Soul.

  Epilogue

  ‘This is the last one.’

  Steve picked up the box and carried it down the stairs. Danyl followed, shuffling sideways, his steel-and-plastic crutch clattering against the banister. By the time he reached the bottom Steve had loaded the final box onto the trolley. It balanced precariously atop a pyramid of cardboard cartons containing Danyl’s meagre possessions: his books, a few clothes, a saucepan and a bag of defrosted corn.

  ‘We’ll go around back,’ he said. ‘It’ll be easier.’

  Steve nodded. He pushed the trolley through the kitchen. The space was lit by the afternoon sun pouring down from the windows of the spare room. Sylvia Gold’s painted window shards glittered on the table. A homecoming present for Verity.

  If she ever came home.

  Danyl took a final look around the room. He committed the moment to memory, sighed and walked out the back door, closing it behind him.

  They followed the path around the side of the house, walking past the gaping pit and excavated septic tank, then through the gate and onto the road. They moved slowly. The air was warm, the trolley was heavy, and Danyl’s leg ached.

  Steve said, ‘How’s the ankle?’

  ‘Sore. At least another month on the crutch.’

  ‘Sorry, buddy.’

  ‘It’s not all bad.’ Danyl pointed to his trousers, a pair of flared green corduroys. ‘The hospital classified me as an indigent so I got to pick whatever clothes I wanted from the lost-and-found bin.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. I also got a blazer and some socks with no holes in them.’

  ‘Impressive.’ Steve did appear genuinely impressed. They continued down the road, past sleeping cats and rusting cars. He cast another glance at Danyl’s trousers. ‘So everything worked out for the best.’

  Danyl considered this. Had everything worked out for the best? Not for Sutcliffe Parsons, who died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The authorities were waiting for the coroner to determine cause of death before deciding whether to prosecute Danyl in relation to it. The police officers responding to Steve’s emergency call were unconvinced by Danyl’s explanation of why he was crippled and naked in a secret tomb hidden in the house of a dying Satanist with a fortune in lost Habsburg-dynasty gold, and treated him as if he was some sort of criminal.