Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  Danyl squinted at the box on the wall. He glanced around to make sure he wasn’t observed, then took the box off its hook, squeezed it between his hands and cracked it open.

  He picked apart the plastic shards, revealing a photo of a drawing. A complex rendition of a large, interlinking spiral.

  Danyl lay in the giant’s bath staring at that same spiral image on the outside of the blue envelope.

  The top of the envelope had been slit open; he could see blue paper inside, folded over, lines crossing over the crease. Writing? Drawing? Danyl didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure that the bathtub of an angry giant was the best place to find out. Not with the giant still lumbering about outside the doorway, grunting and muttering. So he slipped the envelope into one pocket, and the still-blinking but now muted phone into another, and willed himself to focus on his escape plan.

  There was a window above the toilet but a latch prevented it from opening fully, and Danyl would never fit through the gap. He could smash the glass and then climb through, but the giant would hear the sound. No, the only way out of the house was through the front entrance.

  Danyl waited and listened. When the giant’s footsteps moved away, heading towards the far end of the house, he climbed out of the bathtub and peered around the door.

  The beast was in the kitchen, lumbering between the fridge and the bench, preparing itself a drink in a glass the size of a vase. The path out of the bedroom area was through the room divider, but this path was in full view of the kitchen. The giant would see Danyl instantly. He had to find another route.

  He slithered over to the bed and then to the bookshelf. This was stocked with texts on pharmacology, small-business management and sadomasochistic erotic art. The top shelf was at waist height: it held an old-fashioned record player and a stack of records. A wooden set of drawers separated this area off from the kitchen.

  He made his way over to the shelves on his hands and knees and examined the record player. They were a dead technology everywhere else in the world, but the subculture of Te Aro had formed a deep emotional attachment to these devices and they were standard issue in most houses. This one was attached to two speakers, one of which lay just beyond the set of drawers. Between them was a gap large enough for Danyl to crawl through, by which he could access the other half of the house without being seen by the giant.

  A plan took form in his mind.

  He crawled back to the bed, stripped the sheets and made his arrangements. He wriggled beneath the bed and disconnected the extension cord connecting the bedside lamp to a distant power plug. He took a handful of pills from the box and scattered them on the floor. Next, he wound the cord around the headboard of the bed and around one leg of the set of drawers. He connected the plug to the power cord of the record player and made sure this device was switched off before he took a record from the shelf below and placed it on the turntable. Finally, he set the needle on the record and turned the volume on the amplifier up to the maximum level.

  Clever, shrewd Danyl. He tied the loose end of the extension cord around his ankle, making sure there was still plenty of slack, then he squeezed through the narrow gap between the drawers and the bookshelf until his head jutted into the adjacent section of the house.

  The giant was facing away from him, sitting at the table eating muesli from a bucket. There was a power socket in the wall just above Danyl’s head. Danyl lay prone on the floor, the corner of the bookshelf poking into his soft belly; he hugged his knee close to his chest and slipped the extension cord free of his ankle. He took a deep breath and plugged the cord into the power outlet.

  The stereo speakers crackled and hissed. Danyl shrank into the shadows as the room filled with the deafening blare of 1970s French pop music, played at grotesque slowness as the player slowly picked up speed.

  The giant leaped to its feet and began to shout, but it was drowned out by the slow-motion disco-pop. It spun about, its eyes moving over the darkened nook where Danyl cowered. It strode across the house and into the bedroom, while Danyl wriggled through the gap into the living room. Staying low, he scuttled across the floor and past the TV, past the couch and dining table. He was in the kitchen now, almost at the door: but then the sound of the needle lifting from the record tore the air. Silence flooded the room. Danyl crouched below the kitchen counter, the front door just before him. But reaching it would expose him to view. He took Eleanor’s phone from his pocket and positioned it just above the rim of the counter, using the reflective black screen as a mirror to survey the room.

  The giant stood by the record player, looking around in confusion. Then its gaze fell on his bed and it yelled out, ‘What the hell?’ and stepped towards it. It had seen the tableau Danyl arranged on the mattress: the woollen sock, pen and condom wrappers arranged in the form of a smiley face facing the record player. It lurched towards the bed then threw up its arms as its feet scrabbled on the pills. It wobbled, then vanished from view as it encountered the extension cord Danyl had strung across the bedroom at ankle level. The house shuddered with the impact of his fall.

  Danyl gave a little squeal of triumph. He crawled to the front door, opened it, and fled down the path on his hands and knees, grinning and panting and giggling and free.

  12

  Verity’s message

  ‘Soup?’ The bowl steamed, filling the air with the scents of chilli and mint. Danyl nodded and inhaled and sighed.

  He was in the Sufi Soup Emporium, a place on Aro Street that sold Sufi Good Soup at Sufi Low Prices. The proprietor, a small round man with a long white beard and hypnotic brown eyes, set a bowl of steaming chickpea soup down on the table. He bowed and withdrew.

  Danyl set the blue envelope beside it, unopened, and took Eleanor’s phone from his jacket pocket. The display flashed at him: Message waiting.

  Danyl was still shaken after his encounter with the giant. He’d taken a table facing the door of the soup kitchen—there were only three tables, crammed together between the bare concrete walls, the stainless steel serving counter and orange linoleum floor—so he could see the empty stretches of Aro Street through the windows. Every time he looked down at his soup he saw movement outside in his peripheral vision and thought it was the giant come to slay him, or Eleanor and her kitchen hands; but it was always just a bus passing by or a tree bending in the wind.

  He sipped his soup and tried to relax. This café always played a type of mystical North African music: a fusion of cymbals, drums and chanting, and it had a calming effect on Danyl. After a few moments he felt safe.

  He returned the blue envelope to his jacket pocket. He’d risked a lot to get it, but now he didn’t need it: he had an actual message from Verity. Hopefully it would reveal her location. If she was lost he would find her. If she was in danger—and Danyl felt sure she was, even if Verity herself might not realise it—he would rescue her.

  He picked up the phone, turned the volume back on and accessed the voicemail. There was a pause, then the sound of a bad line and Verity’s voice, crackling and broken, saying, ‘It’s me.’

  Verity. Danyl closed his eyes. The subharmonics of her voice—ethereal, mysterious; warm yet cruel—ran through him like a current. He’d found her. Oh, not literally. But he’d made contact. She was more than just a confusion of memories, a riddle from the past. She was real. He had her scent, or, at least a digital recording of it. He was close. Very close.

  The message continued; she said, ‘I’m leaving. You might never see me again. Goodbye.’

  Danyl frowned. He swallowed a chickpea and reminded himself that Verity’s message was meant for Eleanor. It was Eleanor who might never see Verity again. That might be a good thing, although the talk about leaving worried him a little.

  ‘Before I go I want to tell you a story,’ she continued. He heard footsteps in the background: she was calling from a cellphone and walking while she talked. ‘I want to tell you about Simon.’ Danyl licked his lips. Simon was the scientist who lived on the farm near Verity’s
childhood home. He’d played a mysterious and sinister role in her life ever since.

  ‘You asked me how I found him but I never told you. I had this idea that it needed to stay secret.’ She laughed mirthlessly. ‘I had this idea,’ she repeated. ‘We both know, now, that our ideas are not our own. Our thoughts are not ours. Why did I keep that secret? Why am I telling you now?

  ‘After we fought and you left to go into your monastery, I wandered. I drank too much. I lost myself. I spent a lot of time walking the streets of the cities I travelled through. I always took my camera with me, and I woke after week-long blackouts and looked back at all the pictures I took. I saw bars and houses I didn’t remember, saw myself laughing with my arms around people I didn’t know. But mostly I saw streets, buildings, squares. I saw cityscapes taken from impossible vantage points, or districts that couldn’t be identified by anyone I showed them to. I wondered to myself, What are cities? Are they a human invention? Or are they a species of autonomous creature: unthinking, immortal which humans are doomed to perpetuate and service. Do we live in cities or do cities live off us, like parasites? Is that what’s wrong with our species? We evolved as nomadic agrarians but we’ve been captured by this malign idea of urbanism, and now we’re doomed to live and die in thrall to the perpetuation of cities, which will eventually merge to become one vast planetary city. And what then?

  ‘But you know all this. One morning, one city, everything changed. I woke up on a gurney in a hospital ward with a backless hospital gown on and no memory of how I got there. A nurse gave me some clothes from the lost property bin and I wandered around the ward, and eventually found my way into a prayer meeting.

  ‘It was a featureless, mostly empty room. A few quiet cancer patients. I don’t remember what the priest looked like or even if he was a priest or an enthusiastic amateur. All I remember is that he was talking about the Tower of Babel, the old story from Genesis. You know how it goes, or at least you think you do. After the great flood of Noah, the people of the Earth spoke one language and so they attempted to build a tower reaching to the heavens. God saw this and took anger at their pride, and so he destroyed their tower and confused their languages. But at this point in the story, a voice from the back of the room called, “That’s not what happened.”

  ‘I turned. A tall man with receding curly hair and a red beard stood at the back of the room. He wore a hospital orderly outfit with a raincoat over the top and a bag slung over his shoulder. I recognised him but I didn’t remember from where. Someone I’d photographed? Someone I’d slept with? No, the memory was older than that. I knew him when I was young … and then I realised. This was the man who lived at the farm near my childhood home. The man who changed my life. I stared but he didn’t even see me. He was talking to the priest.

  ‘He said, “The story you told is the way it’s always told. People built a tower and God got angry. But pick up a copy of your Bible, any Bible.” He gestured at the pile of King James Bibles stacked on the table by the door. “Read what’s really written. The people built a city—the first city in human history—and a tower, but it was the city that angered God and the city he forced them to abandon by creating a confusion of languages. But why? We don’t know. The Bible doesn’t say. The real story isn’t a parable about pride. It’s a mystery.”

  ‘I can’t remember what else he said, or if the priest replied. But his words shocked me. For months I’d been obsessed with cities, and suddenly this stranger from my past had reappeared in my life, and he’d talked about cities. How could this be? Then I realised he was gone. I ran to the door and saw him turn a corner at the far end of the hall. I followed him through the hospital to his workplace: a microbiology lab. I lurked around outside it for his entire shift, twelve hours, until he walked out through the security doors, unshaven and bleary, and I followed him home to his apartment in a tenement building near the hospital.

  ‘It was Simon, of course. The poor man.’ Verity laughed again. Danyl could hear rushing water in the background of her call, then the sound of her footsteps clattering over wood. ‘Humans have always had an intuition about reality,’ she continued. ‘Everyone suspects it isn’t what it seems, that you can pull back the curtain somehow and find the truth. Simon actually did it. For one brief moment, he stepped outside of existence and then he fell back into it again and spent the rest of his life trying to get out.

  ‘By the time I appeared at his door, he’d given up. He was living in squalor, hiding under a false name, working at a dead-end job. He had no idea who I was. He didn’t remember our first brief meeting. He barely remembered the farm and his laboratory hidden in a barn in its remote, overgrown reaches. That was just another failure in a lifetime filled with them. He barely listened as I introduced myself. He was shutting the door in my face until I told him that I’d crept onto the farm the morning after the police raid, before the bulldozers arrived, and looked inside the barn, and seen the mural he drew of a spiral, vast and incomprehensible, like the fabric of the world had torn itself apart. That picture destroyed my life, I told him. Fifteen years later it still throbbed and coiled inside my mind, taunting me, telling me that everything I saw was an illusion, that I could tear a hole in the world, if I could only figure out how.

  ‘So I stood outside the door to his apartment and told him who I was. He listened, scratching his beard and thinking. Eventually he invited me into his room. I thought it might contain scientific apparatus, or holy books, or perhaps another mural of the spiral, but it was sparsely furnished. The only texts were a few news magazines. He locked the door and I felt my life closing in around me. I sat on his uncomfortable, food-stained couch, wondering if I would ever leave the room alive, and he perched at the end of his bed.

  ‘He would help me, he announced. He would try to find a way back, make one last attempt. There was much he needed to tell me, many things to explain. Things were both simpler and more difficult than I could imagine. But first he needed one thing. One simple thing that I needed to fetch for him. A small vial of water from a certain pool. It was a kind of test, he explained, but also a vital step in the process. Then he smiled. “I’m getting ahead of myself,” he said. “Let me begin at the beginning. I grew up in a place not far from here. A strange old place called the Aro Valley …”’

  Verity broke off. The phone was warm against Danyl’s ear. He listened to her breath; her footsteps as they crunched along a gravel path, the crackling of the line.

  Finally, she said, ‘We both know the rest. Or at least we think we do. We found what we were looking for. A path. A way beyond existence. The Real City. But of course when we found it, we saw that it wasn’t what we really wanted, and that the pathway we’d spent our lives looking for merely led to another pathway. And where does the new one lead?

  ‘That’s what we’ve been trying to find out. That’s what all this … madness has been about. But I think we’ve been doing it wrong. I think we’ve been tricked, Ellie. Lied to. I know you don’t agree with me. And maybe you’re right. I hope you are. But I have to find out.’ There was another pause. More footsteps on gravel, then a series of dull clangs. Steps. Verity was climbing a flight of metal stairs. Danyl counted ten steps. Next he heard a key in a lock, the creak of a door, and Verity said, ‘I’m here now. It’s too late to stop me, even if you wanted to. I might never see you again. If I don’t … I’m sorry. Goodbye.’

  14

  Music and silence and chickens

  Danyl listened to the message three times.

  The first time he was distracted by Verity’s voice and the feelings it evoked. Loss. Sorrow. Rage. Did he still love her? Had she ever loved him? If she did, why had she left him?

  The second time he listened to the actual words of the message. It answered some questions but asked many more. Who was Simon, really? Danyl thought he was just a biochemist, but Verity saw him as a kind of visionary. And where was this mysterious pool?

  The third time Danyl tuned out the words and listened to the
sounds beneath them. Verity was moving around the Aro Valley, talking as she walked. If he could pinpoint the background noises he could track her.

  The message was nine minutes long. He took a scrap of paper from his satchel and wrote down markers at thirty-second intervals, then wrote the sounds as he identified them. At the start of the message was a garbled noise he could not identify. Then her footsteps splashing in puddles. The wind. About two minutes in, he heard metal scraping on concrete, and the wind died away. Perhaps she was walking along a sheltered path or an alleyway? Or inside a building somewhere?

  Four minutes: the sound of running water. A gutter or even a stream.

  Four minutes, thirty seconds: footsteps on wood, then the sound of water faded away. The wind again and Verity’s footsteps crunching on gravel. Behind that an odd squawking noise he couldn’t quite identify. He frowned, tried to tune out her voice … Chickens! Yes, definitely the sound of chickens. They weren’t uncommon in the valley—few people in Te Aro trusted the organic egg industrial complex—but still, a useful clue. For the last few minutes there was only wind and footsteps on gravel, ending with either a climb or descent of a long flight of steps, and then a door opening.

  All good stuff, but the valley was a big place. Danyl really needed to identify the beginning of Verity’s journey. Then he could track the subsequent sounds. He played the message a fourth time, pressing the phone to his ear, concentrating so intently his brain gave him a warning buzz. He ignored it and threw everything he had into deciphering the odd, faint noises in the background at the very start of the message.

  Then Danyl laughed and slapped the table. He had her! The sound at the start of her call was music: cymbals; chanting. It was the mystical music playing in the soup kitchen. Verity had ended her call exactly nine minutes away from the same place he sat now.