Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Victoria University of Wellington

  PO Box 600 Wellington

  vup.victoria.ac.nz

  Copyright © Danyl McLauchlan 2016

  First published 2016

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers

  National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  McLauchlan, Danyl, 1974-

  Mysterious mysteries of the Aro Valley / Danyl McLauchlan.

  ISBN 978-1-77656-047-9 (print)

  ISBN 978-1-77656-032-5 (EPUB)

  ISBN 978-1-77656-033-2 (Kindle)

  I. Title

  NZ823.3—dc 23

  Ebook conversion 2016 by meBooks

  CONTENTS

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART I

  1 A hero’s return

  2 How to eat in Aro Valley for free after midnight

  3 The treasurer

  4 The Free Market

  5 Eleanor

  6 The familiar face

  7 The entrance to the labyrinth

  8 The mysterious deep structure of the universe

  9 The giant

  10 Surprise Symphony

  11 The plot against reality

  12 Verity’s message

  14 Music and silence and chickens

  15 Ye Undergrounde Bookshoppe

  16 Things go really well for a little while

  17 Terrible things happen

  18 Splash

  19 Stream of consciousness

  20 Threshold

  21 Dawn

  22 Flee!

  PART II

  23 The applicant

  24 The plot against reality

  25 The secret archive

  26 The campaign

  27 Clues

  28 Gorgon

  29 The Real City

  30 Back to reality

  31 The Subcommittee for Public Safety

  32 It’s a trap!

  PART III

  33 Danyl unchained

  34 Old friends

  35 What Danyl did

  36 Teamwork

  37 Danyl and Steve match wits against a dog

  38 No!

  39 Steve thinks hard

  40 Danyl tries to out-think the dog

  41 Sophus and Ann

  42 Lacunae

  43 Ann’s story

  44 The great escape

  45 Danyl’s plan works perfectly for several seconds

  PART IV

  46 The council of Danyl

  47 The plan

  48 Combinations

  49 A new ally

  50 Meant to be

  51 What Steve found in the secret archive

  52 Second thoughts

  53 Plenty of time

  54 No time at all

  55 Ragnarok

  56 On the electrodynamics of moving bodies

  57 Lightbringer

  58 Gorgon’s lair

  59 Gorgon’s song

  60 Reasonable discussions and moderate violence

  61 The third dimension

  62 The end

  Epilogue

  Thanks to:

  To Sadie, who told me to put a monster in it

  Mathematics may explore the fourth dimension, and the world of what is possible, but the Czar can be overthrown only in the third dimension.

  —V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909)

  PART I

  1

  A hero’s return

  Danyl stepped off the bus then stepped away as it pulled out from the kerb, splashing up sheets of spray. Its tail lights mixed with the lights reflected in the wet black streets. The hiss of its tyres mixed with the rain.

  And the rain was cold. So cold. He took shelter under a leaky shop awning and watched the bus continue to the end of Aro Street then turn left and vanish. It was just past midnight. Midwinter. He’d been away for six long months, but now he was back.

  Back in the worst place in the world.

  The shop windows were dark. There was no one around; no other vehicles on the road. He took a minute to get his bearings, surveying the terrain through the curtains of rain. He stood in the rough centre of things, halfway along Aro Street which extended from one end of the valley to the other, with streets and alleyways running down to it like streams feeding a thirsty river. The valley itself ran from west to east. It was surrounded by hills on three sides, with the eastern end open and adjoined to the Capital, which Te Aro was geographically in, but culturally and economically and spiritually and sociologically and politically not of. Lower and mid-Aro Street was lined with shops and apartment buildings, barely visible through the darkness and the downpour. The rain pooled on the road, turning it into a muddy sea. The wind swept ominous patterns on the water.

  Danyl’s reflection gazed back at him from the window of a badly parked van. He was a once-attractive man reduced by hard times to mere handsomeness. His light brown hair was long and wet, swept back from his face like an otter’s fur. His glasses were blurry with raindrops. His fine aristocratic features were hidden behind a scraggly beard tinged with premature grey, and he’d gained a lot of weight in the months he’d been away: a side effect of his medication. His clothes were simple but elegant: navy woollen trousers and a rust-coloured tweed jacket, both stolen that morning in a daring raid on a thrift store mannequin. He wore a leather satchel slung over his shoulder. His eyes were clear and bright: twin blue flames gleaming from between a wet brow and pudgy rain-streaked cheeks. Their gaze swept the road and the houses and hills then settled on Devon Street, a narrow road connecting with Aro Street.

  The eyes narrowed; the fire in them flared. He stepped out into the rain.

  A short, damp minute later he stood before his old house, studying it from the opposite side of the road.

  It was a two-storey wooden building with paint peeling from the walls and a front garden crowded with weeds. There was a mail slot in the front door and this was stuffed with letters and pamphlets and community newspapers. They spilled out onto a mound on the path. The windows were dark. The curtains were open. There was no sign of habitation.

  The gate creaked and stuck. Danyl forced it: it groaned open. He kicked his way through the sodden mire of junk mail and weeds to the front door, cleared the debris clogging the mail slot, then took a tiny but powerful torch from his satchel. He knelt and shone it through the slot.

  The hallway beyond was empty, a region of shadows and spiderwebs and dust. The house was deserted; it had been for months.

  And that was a mystery. The house was owned by Danyl’s former girlfriend, Verity: she threw him out when she ended their relationship. He still didn’t know what went wrong between them: his deteriorating mental condition and financial dependence on her may have played a role; he wasn’t sure. He’d never had the chance to find out: a misunderstanding with the criminal justice system had forced Danyl to leave Te Aro, and events had conspired to prevent his return. Until now.

  He’d expected to come back and find Verity back in her old house. Comfortable perhaps, but lonely. Remorseful for the way she’d treated certain people in her past. Repentant.

  Instead she was gone. Where was she? And why didn’t someone else move in and occupy the abandoned home? Property rights in Te Aro were porous. Empty buildings did not remain empty for long. There were always vagrants looking for shelter and experimental dance groups looking
for performance space. They occupied bankrupt shops and the houses of the intestate dead. Where were they?

  He closed the lid of the mail slot and stood up, and the beam of his torch lit up a series of deep scratches in the wood of the door at head height. A message. He stepped back to inspect it.

  Death to the Agents of the Real City

  Danyl frowned. People in Te Aro scrawled death threats on each other’s doors all the time. None of it meant much—but something about this particular threat troubled him. He ran his finger along the wooden stubble, tracing the letters, trying to fathom their meaning, but no answers came.

  His stomach growled, reminding Danyl that he was not only cold and homeless but also very hungry. His original plan was to have Verity welcome him into her house and her arms and then cook him something delicious and nutritious, and feed it to him while sobbing and begging his forgiveness for throwing him out. But this no longer seemed viable. He needed to adapt his plan. Improvise. And his top priority now was to eat before he collapsed of hunger.

  There might be something edible in Verity’s kitchen. Nothing fresh, obviously. But maybe muesli? Noodles? Maybe salted nuts, if the fates smiled on him. He fumbled around in his satchel and found his old house key. He wasn’t sure it would still fit, but it did. He turned the lock and then hesitated.

  Because he wasn’t technically allowed to be there. Just before Danyl left the valley Verity took out a trespass order against him, barring him from the property: a final, baffling gesture of malice. He was legally forbidden to enter his own home.

  But he was cold and really hungry. Shouldn’t the law make an exception for that? Besides, Verity wasn’t even there. He wasn’t trespassing so much as entering her home while she was away and ransacking it in the dead of night. Surely there was no law against that?

  He unlocked the door, forced a semicircle in the pile of junk mail, and stepped over it.

  2

  How to eat in Aro Valley for free after midnight

  Danyl walked through the dark, silent house, remembering the life he’d once lived in it. His relationship with Verity had lasted for about eighteen months. They lived together for less than a year between these very walls, beneath this now leaky roof. He’d been blissfully happy during that time, except for the money problems, and their fights, and his undiagnosed clinical depression, and he thought that Verity was happy too.

  But she wasn’t. He knew that now. Partly that was Danyl’s fault. He was mature enough to admit that. But Verity had problems of her own. Shadows from her past; things she didn’t like to talk about or, if she did, wanted to talk about when Danyl was trying to sleep and didn’t feel like listening. These things had reached into their sunlit life together and contaminated it. Now, walking around her abandoned home with its cryptic threat scratched into the front door, he suspected that those same shadows had reached out and taken her, pulled her back into the darkness she’d climbed out of. And—he was just speculating—maybe those very same shadows had also reached into Verity’s pantry and taken all the non-perishable food.

  Because something had. The doors to the kitchen pantry were open and all of the Tupperware containers were missing. The glass jars for rice and pasta were empty. So were the nuts. The crackers. The noodles. Almost everything was gone: a few sad bottles of vinegar and sesame oil were all that remained.

  Who took Verity’s food? It wasn’t a common thief. Everything else in the house was exactly as Danyl remembered it. The TV and stereo were in the lounge. Verity’s photographs were still on the walls. Constellations of dust spun about in the beam of the torch.

  He climbed the stairs and checked the bedroom. The bed was unmade. The closet was full of Verity’s clothes. No clues. And no food. Nothing for him here but memories and hunger and weakness and silence.

  Wait. There was something else, something missing. Danyl crossed the room to the waist-high bookshelf by the window. This was where Verity kept her scrapbooks and photograph albums. There was a large gap in the centre of the bottom shelf. Some of the books had been removed.

  He found them in the bathroom. The toilet was filled with spiderwebs but the bath was filled with ashes. The pages from Verity’s notebooks had all been torn out, tossed into the bath and burned.

  Their discarded cardboard covers lay in a pile by the wash-basin. Danyl knelt down and sorted through them.

  Journals. Someone had burned Verity’s old journals. These dated back to her childhood; they were filled with drawings and teenage secrets, dreams and poems and longings; Danyl had sometimes flipped through them to laugh at them when he was bored. Why would anyone destroy them?

  One of the discarded covers was marked Verity. Age Fifteen. Private. It was splattered with mud and warped by water, long dried. Danyl picked it up. The pages were gone. Ripped out. The inside cover was blank but, looking closer, he saw indentations. The mark of a pen pressing hard against a page that was subsequently torn and burned.

  He took a scrap of paper and a pencil from his satchel and, holding his torch between his teeth, laid the paper flat upon the inside cover and traced over the indentations with the pencil, watching the invisible marks beneath appear as gaps in the field of graphite.

  A complex network of curves pooled across the empty page. It looked like a prehistoric pattern drawing, or an elaborate mathematical abstraction in the shape of a spiral. When Danyl looked at it from the corner of his eye the spiral seemed to pulsate, then when he looked at it directly it froze back into place; impossible shapes asserted themselves from the complexity then dissolved back into chaos.

  Danyl had seen this spiral before. Oh yes. But what was it? What did it mean to Verity? He looked at the front cover again. Age Fifteen. Private.

  Verity grew up in a quiet seaside town, near an old abandoned farm. She once told Danyl that this farm was raided by the police. They were looking for a fugitive hiding out there, but the fugitive escaped. Not long after that Verity ran away from home and never returned. All of this happened when she was fifteen.

  Why did she leave? Danyl didn’t know, but he would ask her when he found her. Because, he now vowed, he would find her. She was in trouble, he was sure of it, and he would help her, and in her gratitude she’d forgive him and take him back and everything would go back to normal. In a way this was better than his original plan to simply show up on Verity’s doorstep and have her waive the trespass order and beg his forgiveness, a plan that was, in hindsight, unrealistic. But if Verity was in some kind of terrible danger from a dark horror in her past, and Danyl rescued her from it … Forgiveness, right there.

  He grinned, folded up his spiral drawing and slipped it into his satchel.

  The house trembled as another gust of wind shook it. Rain drummed against the roof. Danyl stood by the front door and considered his next move.

  Before he could look for Verity he needed to eat and sleep. But where? He was broke: the bus ticket back to Te Aro had wiped out all of his savings. The only allies he had in the valley were Verity, who was missing, and Steve, who was once Danyl’s closest friend.

  But that friendship hit a rough patch six months ago when Steve was called upon to testify at Danyl’s trial, to vouch for his sanity and good character. But when he took the stand he told the court that character and sanity were illusions, systems of control, and perhaps it was the judge and the legal system that were mad, while Danyl was the sane one. Most of the threats Danyl had screamed as he was dragged from the court after his sentencing were directed at Steve. But a few months later—after Danyl’s court-appointed physician found the right dosages and his mood stabilised—he forgave his friend and sent him a few letters, apologising and describing his new, medicated life. But Steve never replied.

  So Steve’s house was an unknown. Steve might not even live there anymore, and it was in a gully on the far side of Devon Street, accessible only via a steep hill which Danyl would have to walk up in the rain. And even if he still lived there, Steve was not the type to keep food in h
is house.

  Then Danyl’s hungry gaze fell upon a leaflet lying on the hallway floor: junk mail from the mail slot. It advertised the Autumn Equinox Aro Valley Council Election. Beneath this was a map leading to Aro Community Hall and the slogan: ‘Say Goodbye to Yesterday and Hello to a Brighter Future Tomorrow. Tonight!’ The date on the poster was two months ago. The map sparked a memory in his starved and failing brain.

  The Community Hall was just around the corner from Verity’s home. It was a mostly sheltered walk with no hills. There were doorways and alcoves for Danyl to sleep in and, more importantly, there was a crèche where the preschool children of the valley played on their non-competitive playground and tended their vegetable garden.

  Five minutes later Danyl squatted in the crèche garden groping for the base of a carrot. When he had a firm grip he tugged it free of the earth and held it up to the rain, rinsing off the dirt. He sank his teeth into the vegetable’s damp flesh and groaned with delight, then grabbed at another carrot with one hand and a clutch of spinach with the other. He shovelled both into his mouth, snapping his head back to swallow the raw leaves. Eventually his feeding frenzy subsided and he stopped to look around.

  The vegetable garden was in a square raised bed. Two scarecrows stood on either side of him, swaying, their painted smiley faces grinning into the sleet. There were sticks in the dirt around the sides of the garden, each bearing the name and photograph of a rabbit, goat or hamster living somewhere in the valley for whom the vegetables were intended.

  A few more minutes of gorging and Danyl was satisfied. He sat back on his haunches, belched and spat out a small stone. Then he yawned. It was time to sleep.

  The crèche was one of four buildings that made up the civil and administrative centre of Te Aro. Next to it was the Community Hall. Behind the hall was a nest of offices where the council staff worked and plotted against one another, and the separate chamber of the valley’s lone elected Councillor. All of these buildings faced a concrete games court. Beyond the court sat a squat, windowless building: Te Aro Archive.