Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  He turned around, and after a moment he drew in his breath. Lying on the floor just beside the bed was a bright blue envelope. He cried out, ‘Aha!’ and stepped towards it. And then the gigantic man sleeping on the bed snorted and stirred.

  Danyl froze. The bed wasn’t empty. The bed wasn’t empty! When he checked earlier he’d been looking for a naked girl, so he’d failed to notice that the flesh-coloured, oddly stained duvet was actually a huge, naked, muscular man with a shaved head and tattoos. The huge man coughed and rolled over. The bed groaned under his weight.

  Danyl was paralysed with fear. He knew this sensation well. It happened to him a lot, and right now he was roughly in the middle of the fear–paralysis spectrum: he could blink and twitch his fingers, and he did both of these things while the huge man climbed out of bed and stood before him, yawning and scratching his belly, which was covered with tattoos of skulls and roses and eagles and knives. He shouted out, ‘Joy!’ Then he walked past Danyl and around the bed, heading for the bathroom, his uncircumcised penis slapping audibly against his leg. He disappeared into the bathroom. Seconds later came the sound of a torrent of urine coursing into the toilet.

  Thoughts flapped around Danyl’s mind like a plastic bag in the wind. This must be Joy’s boyfriend. Why didn’t he see Danyl? Why did he walk straight past him? How loud his urination was. His urethra must be huge! And why didn’t Danyl see him earlier? A gigantic, dangerous man lying on the bed in plain sight!

  Then he understood. When he looked at the bed he’d expected to see a naked girl, not a terrible giant. His brain had filtered the giant out. And the same thing had happened to the giant! He didn’t expect to wake up and see Danyl in his bedroom so he walked right by him. Also, the light was bad, and Danyl’s jacket blended in with the plaster walls and the murky grey light from the skylight. That was lucky. But his luck wouldn’t hold. The giant would eventually stop urinating and walk back into his bedroom. He’d see Danyl and then he’d hurt him. That’s what Danyl would do if he found a strange man in his bedroom. If he was capable of hurting anyone, which he wasn’t, and if he had his own bedroom, which he didn’t.

  The blue envelope lay at Danyl’s feet. At least he’d found what he came for. All he had to do was grab it then run for the door. He was going to make it.

  He knelt down to pick up the envelope but, as he reached for it, he felt an odd little jolt inside his brain. It wasn’t painful; it felt like the static charge you get when you touch a hot car or an escalator handle, only it was inside his brain. He shook his head and reached for the envelope again, but his brain jolted once more. What was happening to him?

  Danyl’s mind flashed back six months to his doctor’s office, when he was first prescribed his medication. ‘You may need to take it for the rest of your life,’ the doctor warned, waving the little bottle of pills before Danyl’s eyes like a hypnotist. ‘If you ever discontinue it, the process must be carefully managed. Otherwise there could be dire consequences. Mood swings. Cognitive disturbances. Irrational behaviour. Maybe even brain zaps—sudden shock-like discharges inside your brain.’

  Danyl hadn’t experienced any mood swings or irrational behaviour, although he reminded himself to look out for them in the future. But this was definitely a brain zap. He gritted his teeth and lunged for the envelope one last time, only to snatch his hand back as his brain jolted him a third time. He hissed in frustration.

  Then the roar of the giant’s urination stopped. The toilet flushed. Footsteps shook the floor. Danyl scuttled to the bed and dived under it, rolling out of sight just as the tree-trunk-sized legs of the giant came into view.

  The giant moved back and forth across the bedroom. He stepped into a pair of fluffy brown slippers. He yelled out ‘Joy!’ again.

  There was dust under the bed. There was always dust in these situations: Danyl knew not to breathe through his nose but to open his mouth as wide as possible and inhale and exhale, slow and deep. That way he wouldn’t sneeze. He could see the blue envelope out of the corner of his eye but he also knew not to reach for it, or even turn his head to look at it. Beds were fine places to hide in theory, but they were often cluttered with forgotten bric-a-brac, and the slightest motion could spring open a suitcase or send an empty wine bottle rolling across the hardwood floors.

  He did not move. He waited. He took slow, steady breaths. Things would be OK. The giant would take a shower, eventually, or go outside to look for his girlfriend, and Danyl could make his escape. All he needed to do was keep calm and not make any silly mistakes.

  He closed his eyes, turned his head and rested his cheek against the cool floor.

  Eleanor’s cellphone rang.

  10

  Surprise Symphony

  Danyl didn’t have a phone of his own and in his terror of the giant he’d forgotten about stealing Eleanor’s, so when Haydn’s Surprise Symphony started playing, he thought he’d nudged an old alarm clock, or something. Then he realised the sound was coming from his jacket pocket. He pulled out the stolen phone. The ringtone grew louder. The caller ID flashed a name on the glowing screen.

  Verity.

  Danyl stared at the phone in perfect comprehension. Of course it was Verity. He’d called her half-a-dozen times from Eleanor’s phone; now she’d seen those missed calls and responded, and this chain of events would lead to Danyl being beaten by a huge, hairy naked man. He pressed the button to terminate the call but it was too late. Far too late. The house shook as the giant approached. ‘Joy?’ He knelt down.

  Danyl shifted backwards, wriggling to the other side of the bed as soundlessly as possible, getting ready to break cover and run. The giant was on his knees trying to see under the mattress, but he was too large. Instead he fumbled beneath the bed with a massive dinner-plate-sized hand. Danyl cowered just out of its reach. Then the hand withdrew.

  ‘Joy?’ The giant sounded angry. ‘Joy?’

  Danyl needed a plan. He needed tools. He glanced around and saw a power cable connected to a bedside lamp, some empty condom wrappers, a giant woollen sock and a ballpoint pen. And there was something else: a small steel box near the head of the bed. He tried to pull it towards him but it was fixed to the floor. The lid was open. Danyl wriggled closer and looked inside. The box was filled with vials of pills.

  He remembered Joy standing in the alleyway saying, ‘I’m a drug dealer’, and passing Danyl her card. Ask me about my Phenethylamines. This was Joy’s hidden stash. Danyl’s mind raced. Maybe he could combine the drugs with the power cable and the condom wrappers and fashion them into some sort of weapon? He tried to think, to concentrate. But then he twitched as his brain jolted him yet again. His doctor’s voice came back to him. ‘The discontinuation syndromes will be aggravated by stress.’

  Yes, Danyl thought at his brain: I know you’re under stress. I’m under stress too, and I need you to find a way to get us out of this situation, not make it worse. His brain replied with a second sullen zap, then his eyes—still casting about wildly—focused on a distant object on the kitchen table, halfway across the room, visible through the gap in the room divider. An old-fashioned corded telephone with a keypad.

  Danyl had Joy’s business card in his pocket. Did it have her home number on it? Would phoning it distract the giant? Possibly not, but it was still better than trying to build a weapon from a sock and some pills in less than five seconds. He took out Joy’s card and punched the number into Eleanor’s phone, his damp, trembling finger slipping on the keypad. He keyed in the last digit just as the giant’s massive hands wrapped around the bedframe and began to lift it into the air.

  Danyl rose with it. He’d grabbed the underside of the mattress and braced his feet against the base. This wouldn’t hide him for long, though. Maybe another second—and then the giant was tipping the bed onto its side and kneeling down, first his torso then his massive face coming into view as the bed tipped sideways. The phone’s display flashed: Connecting …

  The giant’s eyes were the size and i
ntensity of candescent light bulbs. They swept the area below the bed. A mere flicker of its mighty ocular muscles and it would look directly at Danyl.

  The display on the phone changed to Ringing, and the telephone on the other side of the house rang out. Danyl clung to the mattress, his teeth clenched, his breath trapped in his lungs. He hung there like this for a very long time—between two and four seconds—while the giant looked over its shoulder in the direction of the phone. Then it stood, letting the bed drop back down. Danyl lost his grip and fell to the floor, but his whimper of pain was drowned out by the thunder of the giant’s passage.

  The phone stopped ringing just as the giant reached it. It snatched it up and, when it heard nothing but a dial tone, spun about and returned to the bedroom. It lifted the bed again and looked underneath. It looked behind the dresser and glanced into the bathroom. It called out ‘Joy?’ Then it stomped back to the kitchen, muttering to itself.

  Danyl was in the bathroom, lying in the bath below the rim, trembling with fear, holding Eleanor’s stolen phone in one hand and something clenched in his fist in the other.

  He uncurled his fingers to reveal a mass of blue paper screwed into ball.

  Ha! The blue envelope! Danyl had picked it up on the way to the bathroom and he’d done so without thinking about it so that his brain couldn’t stop him. Brilliant.

  There was something drawn on the outside of the envelope, visible between his white knuckles. He breathed out, very slowly, and further unclenched his fingers.

  The envelope opened like a flower. Inside its torn petals was a picture of a spiral.

  11

  The plot against reality

  Verity’s second photography exhibition opened on a warm evening in mid-summer. The party was held in the showroom of Te Aro Art Gallery. This was a large, bare room with white walls and polished wooden floors.

  Danyl arrived late. He’d overslept. He’d been sleeping a lot, recently, and even when he was awake he never had any energy. He’d barely written a word of his book. He’d even forgotten that Verity’s exhibition was today until he woke to find a Post-it note stuck to his bare belly, reading:

  Darling. I know things haven’t been right between us, but my opening is at five and I’d love you to be there.

  Verity

  The gallery was crowded and loud. Danyl squeezed through a group of nudists clustered around the doorway and peered through the throng, looking for Verity. He found her on the far side of the room talking to a circle of artists and critics. Eleanor stood beside her, nodding as Verity explained her work.

  Verity pointed at something on the wall, and at first it looked like a black photograph with no frame, but as Danyl moved closer he saw it wasn’t a photo at all but a black plastic box approximately the size of a thick, hardback book. He took another look around the room. There were about twenty of the black boxes on display. No actual photographs could be seen.

  What was going on? Danyl wound his way through the crowd to one of the boxes and examined it. There were no distinguishing features. It was just a black box. A card on the wall beside it read: Title: Dimensions III. Please do not attempt to look at the art.

  He noticed a man and a woman standing before the adjacent box. They were inserting their hands into a hole in the bottom of the case and making little cooing sounds. Danyl did the same. At first the case seemed empty, but after a few seconds of grasping, his fingertips encountered a slick glassy surface. It was a photograph.

  Then a voice whispered in Danyl’s ear, ‘I warbed you about thib.’

  Danyl snatched his hand out of the case and turned around. The hideous whisper had come from Steve, who had a mouthful of hors d’oeuvres. He grinned at Danyl, revealing a row of parsley-coated teeth, and gestured at the box on the wall. ‘This ib part of it. Part ob the plob against reality.’

  Danyl had seen quite a bit of Steve since their first encounter in the café. He lived in the Devon Street gully and most afternoons he dropped by Danyl’s house unannounced. Steve was a psychologist, he’d explained on his first visit when he strolled into the lounge without knocking, kicked off his shoes and put his feet up on the coffee table. He was eight years into his PhD, which was something to do with the history of the Aro Valley, although he admitted he was still nailing it down. ‘My supervisor retired and died,’ he explained. ‘And none of the other lecturers knows about me. So that gives me a lot of academic freedom. I mostly follow my intuition, intellectually.’ He unbuttoned his pants and reached for the TV remote.

  Steve borrowed a lot of Danyl’s detective novels for research and this seemed to relate to his thesis, somehow. When Danyl brought up Steve’s allegations about Verity, Steve just winked and said, ‘I’m handling it,’ and went back to watching a talk show about reincarnation romance. But now he swallowed his mouthful of hors d’oeuvres, pointed at the black cases on the wall, and said, ‘This is what I warned you about. Art.’

  Danyl looked at the plastic rectangle fixed to the wall. ‘Art?’

  ‘Art is one of the ways in which our perceptions of reality are manipulated,’ Steve replied. ‘Consider sunsets. We think they’re beautiful, but only because artists have programmed us to think so. What if sunsets are actually quite ugly?’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Think about it. Have you talked to Verity about this exhibition?’

  ‘I’ve been pretty busy—’

  ‘Come.’ Steve took his arm. ‘Listen.’ He manoeuvred Danyl through the crowd, stopping only to sweep a passing platter of mini-pizzas into his mouth. They circled the room and came up behind Verity, who was explaining her work to a frowning, nodding, grey-haired pot-bellied nudist couple.

  ‘You’ve come here to see a photo exhibition,’ she said. ‘But you can’t see the photos.’

  ‘It’s very clever,’ the nudist man assured her, but the nudist woman shook her head. ‘Why can’t we see the photos?’ she demanded. Her partner huffed loudly and rounded on her. ‘You’re missing the point. Imbecile!’

  ‘No. She’s right,’ Verity said. ‘Anyone can take a photo and display it for people to see. I want people to think about my photographs as objects they can’t see. Consider this box.’ She took the black plastic box off the wall and flourished it. ‘We perceive it through our five senses. We can see it, touch it, smell it, taste it and listen to it.’ She knocked on it. ‘But our five senses are limited. They don’t provide a complete picture of reality. We don’t see all of the box.’

  ‘What don’t we see?’

  Verity replied. ‘Almost everything. This box feels real, right?’ She waited while the nudist couple touched the box to satisfy themselves that it did, in fact, exist. ‘But it—and everything else we see, including ourselves—is mostly empty space. A vacuum occupied by fluctuating mathematical objects called probability waves. The waves can’t co-exist in the same location as one another—no one knows why—so the box can’t collapse in on itself, or fall through my hands and then through the floor and down through the earth. That’s why it seems solid. But really, it, both of us, all of this’—she gestured at the crowded gallery—‘is nothing.’

  The nudists seemed immensely pleased by this notion. ‘What was your inspiration for all of this?’ the man asked.

  ‘My friend Eleanor.’ Eleanor nodded dourly at the couple as Verity continued. ‘Ellie’s a Taoist. Taoists know all about contemporary physics. They’ve known it all for millennia. We’d be fools to think our current scientific understanding of reality is definitive. Who knows what remains to be discovered?’ She turned the box on an angle. ‘Perhaps the photograph inside this box extends off into other dimensions that we can’t yet see? It seems to be smaller than the box but perhaps the real photograph dwarfs us all in both scale and intricacy? It might be part of some vast machine or even a living creature that only intersects with our perception of reality in tiny, insignificant ways. We could be inside the body of some vast and apprehending beast, but the only way it projects itself into the sliver of space-time t
hat we experience is through the photograph inside this box.’

  ‘You see?’ Steve tugged Danyl away from Verity to the corner of the gallery. ‘Didn’t I warn you about your girlfriend?’

  ‘You did.’ Danyl frowned, confused. Verity’s photographs were usually of buildings, or landscapes or female nudes that were a critique of the objectification of women, somehow. All this talk of reality was very unlike her. There was something strange going on. But Danyl doubted it had anything to do with extra-dimensions. No, the evil was far more proximate. He glared at Eleanor, then turned as Steve gripped his arm and said, ‘We have to see what’s inside these cases.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Weren’t you listening to your girlfriend? She’s talking about reality. Openly. Flagrantly. She’s part of the plot against reality!’

  Danyl said, ‘I never really understood the plot.’

  Steve pointed a cheese puff at Danyl. ‘If you change the way people think about reality then you change reality itself. And, as I explained when we met, someone or something is manipulating our civilisation—our species—into perceiving reality a certain way. Your girlfriend and this exhibition are part of that.’ He gestured at the plastic box nearest to them. ‘We need to break one of these open. We’ll have to come in at night. Disable the alarms. Does this gallery have a dog? You know, like they do at junkyards? We’ll need to drug it, or win its trust. And the boxes themselves may be alarmed. It will be incredibly dangerous. Are you free later this evening?’