Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  Steve withdrew his hand and stepped behind a rusting trolley. ‘Maybe later,’ he demurred. ‘Why don’t you tell me your story first?’

  ‘Smart kid.’ Strawberry grinned, revealing a row of teeth filed down into fangs. He sat on the bottom step and began to talk.

  He’d once had a job, Strawberry explained. And a house. A family. A life. He was a journalist right here in Te Aro. But he asked the wrong questions. Angered the wrong people.

  ‘What happened?’ Steve asked him.

  In response, Strawberry pointed down the valley. ‘You see that building?’ He indicated a squat concrete structure on the far side of the park. ‘That’s Te Aro Archive. Everything that’s happened in this valley is recorded in there. Every election. Every crime. Every secret. There are places like the archive everywhere. Libraries. Halls of Record. Bureaucracies. Data warehouses. They have dossiers. Databases. Files. They’re supposed to contain information about the world, about us.’ He swept his arm towards the buildings, the road, the valley, Steve himself. ‘All of this. But somewhere along the way, the relationship reversed. The information no longer describes us. Now we describe it. If it changes, reality changes. You might think you own your own house, but if your bank’s information about you changes’—he snapped his fingers—‘you’re out on the street. And if all our information disappears …’ He lit a cigarette and uncrossed his legs, revealing that he wasn’t wearing any shorts or underwear beneath his baggy sweater. ‘Well, we disappear. That’s what happened to me.’

  Strawberry was right, Steve thought, as he made his way home to type up his interview notes. Information about reality dictated reality. His experiences in the library proved that. But if Steve could manipulate the university library, what was to stop some individual or group doing that on a massive scale? To cities? Nations? Countries? All of reality itself?

  Nothing. It had happened. Steve knew, therefore it was happening; now, all around. And he might never prove that this conspiracy was real. By its very nature there would be no evidence; indeed, the lack of evidence was irrefutable proof of this conspiracy’s existence.

  Steve decided to search anyway. The next day he went looking for Strawberry to find out more about his nonexistent past. But Strawberry was gone. The official story was that he had gone into the Capital and bitten off a policeman’s fingertip and was then committed to a secure psychiatric unit but Steve knew the truth. He’d been locked away because he knew too much.

  Next, Steve tried Te Aro Archive. A sign on the door read ‘No Admittance to Anyone Under Any Circumstances’. Steve phoned the council and spoke to the archivist, many times: the archive was always closed, and there was always an excuse: earthquake strengthening, asbestos, radiation leaks.

  Steve continued with his studies. He finished his honours degree and began his doctorate. But he never forgot Strawberry, or the archive, or the plot against reality, which was everywhere and nowhere. He made a list of all the thinkers and visionaries who might have known about the plot. They could never say anything out loud, of course, but they hinted at it in their works. Painters. Poets. Psychics. Steve had his contacts at the library set alerts on books by these individuals. Anyone reading certain combinations of these texts would be flagged to Steve’s attention.

  Then, about a year ago, Verity’s name tripped one of these alarms. Steve made contact with her hapless boyfriend, Danyl. He gathered intelligence about Verity. He went to her house while she was out and watched daytime TV with Danyl. He ate her leftover food. He went to the opening of her photography exhibition, and when he heard her describe her work, all of Steve’s suspicions were validated. Verity was involved in a plot against reality.

  Shortly after this discovery, Steve’s life was rocked by a series of catastrophes. Verity vanished. Danyl was taken into custody and sent out of the valley. The cult that Steve was studying for his doctoral work disintegrated, and Steve himself was dismissed from his department, his enemies on the university ethics committee picking their moment to strike while Steve was distracted by all this turmoil.

  That’s how Steve found himself in the faculty office, flanked by two security guards waiting to escort him from the campus, while an associate dean gave him career advice. Steve’s teaching methods were unacceptable, the associate dean explained, but the university had generously decided not to file a police complaint, so Steve could still consider a career as a secondary school teacher, and the faculty would provide a reference. Was he interested?

  Steve was not. He wasn’t listening to the associate dean. His eyes had drifted to the noticeboard outside the glass office, and an ad in the Situations Vacant that began ‘Illiterate Wanted’. The ad bore the logo of Te Aro Community Council.

  And here Steve was, at long last. He waited for the archivist’s footsteps to die away. Then he picked up a large cardboard box and blockaded the door with it. Best to take precautions.

  He picked up a random folder from the pile at his feet, blew the dust and mouse droppings off it and read: ‘Minutes of Te Aro Council Meeting: All Hallows Eve, 1982.’ He sighed a deep satisfied sigh and began to read.

  Steve wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He knew there was something wrong with the world, something rotten at its core. He’d been lied to; everyone had. But he wasn’t sure who had lied about what, or why. But there were answers in the archive and he would find them.

  He spent the first week cleaning. Before he could learn anything he needed to impose some order; teach the rodents and beetles who was boss. He worked his way through the sea of papers to the first row of shelves, sorting and stacking and poisoning as he went. The archivist checked on him from time to time, monitoring his progress, but these visits became less frequent. In the second week they stopped altogether.

  That’s when Steve’s research began. He smuggled pens and notebooks into the building. He read minutes and reports. He scoured boundary maps. He studied the findings of property inspectors, engineers and dowsers, all commissioned by the council for various reports over the years.

  He learned many things. He learned that the geology of the Aro Valley was very different from that of the surrounding region. The bedrock beneath most of the Capital was composed of strata of recent volcanic rock, but the earth beneath Te Aro consisted of ancient crystalline basement sediments laid down in the Precambrian Era. This meant that the Aro Valley was one of the last surviving parts of Vaalbara, the Earth’s mysterious and sinister first supercontinent. No one knew what had happened to Vaalbara, or how and why the fragments of it comprising the bedrock below the valley had survived the tectonic shifts of the eons. Was this related to the plot? Or was it just a distraction? He marked the geological surveys as suspicious but interesting, and moved on.

  Steve also discovered who owned most of the property in Te Aro. Although the area was slowly gentrifying, most of the houses, still old and poorly maintained, were owned by slumlords. The wealthiest of these slumlords had died many years ago, Steve learned, but his death was kept secret because the mad old man bequeathed all of his estate to a handsome cabbage tree not far from the public toilets on Aro Street. Did that mean the public owned the land? No one knew. What happened if the tree died, or was killed by its angry tenants, of whom there were many—for, in truth, the tree was an indifferent landlord. No one knew the answer to that, either, and as property values in the valley soared, the tree grew ever more wealthy and powerful.

  Much else that Steve read was dull. Lists of expenses. Transcripts of councillors bickering over what to name public benches or alleyways. Trivia. And none of it, not even the revelations about the cabbage tree or the Vaalbara supercontinent, brought Steve closer to what he was really looking for. Proof of the plot against reality.

  By the end of his third week as apprentice archivist, he was halfway across the room and the frozen wave of papers and folders stood at head height. It needed to be barricaded with boxes and braces jerry-rigged from broken shelves. It creaked and groaned as Steve laid out grids
of documents across the floor beneath its shadow, trying to make sense of the chaotic bureaucratic intricacies of sixty years of community business.

  He learned about feuds. Love affairs. Pacts and betrayals. Yet he was no closer to the secret. It was in here, somewhere. Hidden in some box, sunk deep beneath the paper sea. But he had yet to find a hint. Or maybe he’d found it and passed it over? Maybe there was a story here, but it was too scattered to read.

  Steve rearranged the papers into chronological order. Year by year. There were a few ancient, yellowed documents from the 1940s. Then two large piles from the fifties. With the sixties came an explosion of documentation. And the early seventies were even worse.

  By then Steve was into his fifth week. His fingers were lacerated with paper cuts and mouse bites. His lungs rattled with mucus—an infection from breathing in the mould that layered the papers at the bottom of the great wave. Steve was on the verge of giving up, of abandoning his dream, when he found his first clue. Or, rather, didn’t find it.

  1974 was missing.

  It manifested as a great gap. A pile of papers from 1973. An even greater pile from 1975. From the year in between: nothing. Not even a community newsletter.

  That was strange. Maybe the entire year waited in the great unsorted pile beyond the barricade? But Steve doubted it. Perhaps the secret he was looking for was not information, but the absence of it. Now that he thought back through the tens of thousands of pages and millions of words he’d read since he entered the archive, there were many inexplicable gaps. Pages cut from reports or newsletters. Maps with sections torn from them. Minutes redacted.

  Steve had thought this was just random entropy. Mice. Insects. Bureaucrats. Time. But now he saw a pattern. There were clusters of spaces. Someone had gone through and deliberately erased traces of … something. Whatever it was, it began in the early 1970s, and peaked with the redaction of an entire year.

  He kept searching, invigorated. A forgotten secret was one thing, but a deliberately concealed secret—a mystery—was the best secret of all. He climbed the barricade. He fought and destroyed the last and greatest of the rats’ nests. He found tiny clues: sentences that weren’t quite blacked out; shreds of maps; indexes to destroyed reports. Gaps within the gaps. He began to piece things together.

  Something had happened in Te Aro in 1974.

  It involved a man named Matthias Ogilvy. Ogilvy was a property developer. Politically connected. He bought a large tract of land somewhere in the valley. He worked with the government in the Capital to make great changes to Te Aro. Widen the roads. Build a commercial district. State housing. Tenement buildings. A commercial development on his land. He would upgrade the entire infrastructure to support it all. There was outrage—town meetings, protests—but the plans went ahead anyway. Then, in late 1974, something happened. Someone vanished. Ogilvy cancelled his plans. The government abandoned its urban renewal scheme and the valley remained the way it was.

  And there the record ended. Steve continued to search for that one clue that would explain everything or, at least, tell him where to search next. Finally, in his seventh week at the archive, with winter drawing near and rain dripping through holes in the roof, he found it.

  It was a box. It had gotten damp at some stage and then dried, and the bottom was wrinkled and warped. Steve could tell just by lifting it that the box was empty.

  He opened it anyway and looked inside. There were ink stains on the base, and just at the edge were words transferred from a wet document. Steve turned the box around, trying to make them out, but they were too blurred, too faded. All he could make out were a few words. It was a news story written by a man named Jacob Strawberry, about a place called Threshold.

  25

  The secret archive

  ‘Is there a second archive? A secret archive?’

  ‘Eh?’ The archivist frowned. He sat at his desk in the council building, smoking pot from a cheap plastic bong and watching moon-landing conspiracy videos on the internet. It was late afternoon. The shadows were long. The only other council staffer left in the building was the new treasurer, whispering with her horrible young mathematics student. Steve lowered his voice and leaned closer to the archivist.

  ‘A woman knocked on the door to the archive today,’ he said. ‘A historian. She wanted to do some research.’ He held up his hands as the archivist’s bloodshot eyes went white with fear. ‘Relax. I told her we’d sprayed the interior of the building for bugs, that it couldn’t be re-entered for thirty-six months.’

  The archivist relaxed back into his chair. ‘Good lad,’ he murmured. ‘Quick thinking.’

  ‘But then she told me, “The documents I need are in the second Te Aro Archive.” That got me to wondering if we had some kind of … I don’t know … second archive?’

  The archivist tugged at his goatee. He asked, ‘What did this woman look like?’

  ‘Medium height,’ Steve replied. ‘Inquisitive. Persistent. Troublesome. Brown hair.’

  ‘What documents did she want?’

  ‘She wouldn’t say.’

  ‘Did she mention—?’ The archivist hesitated. He scrutinised Steve’s face, obviously speculating how far he could trust his apprentice. Steve adopted his most cheerful, oblivious grin. Reassured, the archivist asked, ‘Did she mention anything about reality?’

  Steve’s face remained impassive. ‘Reality. Reality. Let me think. She did … talk about existence a little bit.’

  ‘Aha.’ The archivist snapped his fingers. ‘You were right to bring this to me. Alert me immediately if you see this historian again. And tell no one else of this.’

  ‘Of course.’ Steve glanced over at the treasurer then leaned close to the archivist. ‘Is it true then? Is there a second archive?’

  The archivist licked his teeth and said, ‘Of course not.’

  Darkness. Rain. Steve.

  He hid in the shadow cast by the climbing frame that loomed over the crèche’s non-competitive playground. Waiting. Watching.

  It didn’t take long. The door to the council offices opened and the archivist emerged. He looked about: suspicious, paranoid—but he didn’t see Steve. He scuttled over to the Councillor’s Chamber and looked about again before slipping a key into the lock. He opened the door and entered.

  Steve nodded to himself in grim satisfaction. His theory was correct. The documents missing from the archive hadn’t been lost, or destroyed. They’d been hidden in a second, secret archive, and the archivist’s fear of Steve’s ‘inquisitive historian’ had led him right to it.

  The archivist wasn’t supposed to be in the Councillor’s Chamber. No one was. According to the Te Aro Charter, the chamber was inviolate until a new Councillor was elected at the end of the week.

  Like most psychologists Steve could move through the darkness without making a sound. He slipped over the crèche fence and across the quad to the lit window. The curtains in the chamber were drawn but they had huge holes in them where moths had eaten their way through, so Steve looked directly into the room.

  It had wood-panelled walls and a polished wooden desk. The archivist stood in the corner next to a large closet. He was trying one key after another in the lock. None of them worked. His angry muttering was audible through the glass. Eventually he found the right key and opened the closet, revealing a row of cowboy outfits and, below them, a filing cabinet with a combination lock. He twirled the dial a few times and tried to open it. It didn’t budge. He neighed to himself in satisfaction then locked the closet.

  Steve slipped away. He walked home, thinking, planning; his hyper-accelerated brain considered all the possibilities. By the time he’d splashed his way down the muddy path to his front door, he knew what he had to do.

  Next morning he was late to work.

  The archive was now a neat, orderly place. The giant wave of paper was gone. Everything had been arranged: assimilated into the shelves or the great piles of boxes between them. In the centre of the floor was a clear space whe
re Steve had partially assembled a giant aerial map of Te Aro.

  He blockaded the door, as always, then set to work. He was trying to complete the map then link the property lots to the location of the land that Ogilvy had once owned. That way he could pinpoint the location of the legendary Threshold development.

  This wasn’t easy. Everything to do with Ogilvy had been erased or moved to the secret archive. But Steve was finding patterns in the gaps: properties that existed during the 1960s then vanished in the early seventies. He pieced the maps together: yellowed faded aerial photos intersecting with bright satellite imagery. Gradually the entire valley emerged—except for a blank space high up the valley where tree-covered hills crowded around a sloping field that wasn’t there, and a remote section of Aro Street that vanished into nothing before reconnecting with another photo and winding up into the gloomy eastern hills. Whatever Threshold was, and whatever happened in it, it was all in that gap; that absence in space and time.

  Something moved in the recesses of the archive.

  Steve froze. His senses were attuned to the rustling of rodents and insects, but they were all dead now. This was something larger. It came from the far corner.

  The archivist materialised out of the gloom and walked towards Steve, who sat cross-legged beside his map. The archivist walked across it, his feet crunching on the ancient papers and photographs.

  ‘Well, well.’ He stood before Steve and folded his arms, waiting. Steve smiled pleasantly and said nothing.

  The archivist filled the silence. ‘Nobody knows about the secret archive. The Sheriff knew, but he never breathed a word of it to anyone before he died. The secretary knows the combination to the filing cabinet, but he doesn’t know what’s in there. So I asked myself, “How would some historian know of its existence?”’

  ‘There was no historian. I made it up.’

  ‘Ha!’ He pointed an accusatory finger at Steve. ‘You admit it. You lied. I’ve been checking on you, lad.’ He circled Steve, who remained stationary in his cross-legged position. ‘While you’ve been in here researching’—he spat out the word—‘I’ve done a little research of my own.’ He whipped a piece of paper from the pocket of his blazer and shook it in Steve’s face. ‘In the resumé you submitted to the secretary when you applied for this job, you claim to have worked at the The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal. I tried to call them to ask about you, and learned that it was destroyed by a Babylonian army in 700 BC.’ He flipped to another page. ‘You supplied a reference from the Antarctic Museum of Indigenous History. I phoned them too, and they’d never heard of you. You’re a fraud, Steve. And you can read. You’re a stinking, reading literate. Admit it.’