Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

He’d laid out his plan. They would scuttle back to the house using the bath as protection, then use it to blockade the door. Steve would hold it in place while Danyl ran back through the house, climbed out the back window, got the dog’s attention and tricked it into chasing him back inside. Danyl could then run to the front door, by which time Steve would be ready to slam it shut the instant Danyl ran through, thus trapping the dog in the building.

  It was a great plan, Steve had said, nodding with approval. And yet, Danyl wondered, as he sped towards the entrance hall jumping over piles of construction debris like a nimble but terrified steeplechase pony, was any plan in which a drooling beast chased him through the darkness towards a remote exit really, truly great?

  He jumped on a pile of boards, then jumped off it and sailed through the air, his legs pedalling in space. Before he landed, his brain gave him a series of gentle zaps. Danyl blinked them away, trying to concentrate. Be quiet, he thought at his brain. I’m handling this.

  His brain had a point, though. Danyl was supposed to avoid stressful situations and here he was being chased by a monster through a ruined building. Maybe he’d chosen poorly. Should he have abandoned Steve after all and fled when he had the chance? No. That thought was unworthy. Steve was Danyl’s friend: saving him was the right thing to do. It was nice to think he’d made one good choice in his life.

  But once he’d trapped the dog and escaped from Threshold, Danyl would need to leave the valley immediately. Go back to his former tranquil life. Become Medicated Danyl again. He would never solve the mystery of the Real City, or the Spiral, or Verity’s disappearance, but if the price of knowledge was being eaten by a dog, then it was a price he was not prepared to pay.

  He landed with organ-bruising force. The dog was right behind him: he heard its paws scrabbling on the tiles. But he was in the entrance hall. He was going to make it. There was the door, a rectangle of sunlight. There was Steve, silhouetted. There was a shape behind him. Danyl couldn’t make it out; the light was too bright. But he could see Steve’s face: the smile lines around his eyes, the stubble on his head. His lips were moving. Was he saying something? Danyl couldn’t hear over the tide of blood pounding in his ears.

  And then the room dimmed. The light was going out. Why? A solar eclipse? No! The door was closing! Steve was shutting it, trapping Danyl in the house with the dog!

  Danyl couldn’t even scream. He didn’t have the oxygen. He met Steve’s eyes and mouthed his name, and the beam of light tightened. The shape behind Steve swam into focus like an object in a telescope.

  It was Ann, the treasurer.

  The light vanished and the door clicked shut.

  39

  Steve thinks hard

  Steve closed the door, kneeled down and leaned against it, blockading it.

  The door was wood. It was warm from the sun. From the other side came footsteps. Barking. Furious screams. Behind him Ann was saying something. Steve ignored these distractions. He was trying to think. Some combination of thoughts had turned a key inside his mind and he remembered what he saw on his second journey to the Real City.

  Danyl and Steve had discussed the Real City before escaping the townhouse and being attacked by the dog. What was it? What were the pathways? What was the Spiral and where did it lead? Was the Real City another reality? Or an ultimate reality? Was it, Danyl had wondered, a more real reality?

  Steve insisted that there was no ultimate reality. There was no face behind the mask of appearance. It was all masks. Everything was a symbol for something else. A pointer to a pointer. But you couldn’t explain that to Danyl. He refused to believe there was nothing to believe in. You couldn’t make him understand that there was nothing, ultimately, to understand. Steve focused on what mattered. What happened here, in Te Aro, not some alternate or ultimate reality, or whatever the Real City was or was not.

  But Gorgon cared about the Real City and Gorgon was Steve’s enemy. Anything that might help defeat her: any clue, any weakness, any scrap of intelligence could be vital. Steve’s subconscious had noticed something and the act of locking Danyl inside the townhouse with the savage dog had somehow unlocked the memory.

  The paths in the Real City had changed.

  There wasn’t much to see in the City. Plazas. Pathways. Void. The Spiral. That uniformity made it difficult to map. Everywhere looked the same, and not even Steve’s powerful intellect could chart it. If he’d been allowed to wake every day and document his path, then take a different one the next night, he could have done so. That’s what Sophus and the rest of the Cartographers did.

  Why? They wanted to reach the Spiral, obviously. But why were they keeping all those so-called pilgrims captive in the City? Why lure more prisoners into the bookshop? Why not just chart the City themselves? During his first imprisonment, Steve had observed that the number of pathways connecting to each plaza was always an even number. When he returned to the Real City today, his subconscious noticed that this had changed. Some plazas had three pathways, and some pathways led to dead ends, meaning that the plaza at the terminus had only one pathway.

  Interesting, but what did it mean?

  This wasn’t the best time to be trying to figure that out, to be honest. Steve was deep in enemy territory, chained to a bathtub, alone, having just locked his only ally in a house with a savage dog, and with a lot of generally stressful stuff going on around him. But Steve’s intellect was like a runaway train. It had momentum. He couldn’t just think about something more pressing, like Danyl screaming from behind the locked door, or why Ann the treasurer was here, her hands cuffed behind her back, or even what he was going to do about the goat-faced archivist holding a syringe filled with DoorWay to Steve’s throat. No, his mind bore down on the problem of the Real City.

  It had changed. Why?

  Was it because the number of people trapped in the City had increased? Was the act of observing the City generating a pathway through the maze? Had that been Gorgon’s plan all along—to imprison enough people in the Real City to bring a route through it into being, then travel to the Spiral herself? That had to be it. It explained everything. That was the reason Gorgon was so furious at Steve. His operations struck at the heart of her scheme. That was why she’d imprisoned him in a room flooding with water. When that failed, she’d sent her top lieutenants to capture Steve and bring him before her, and that’s why Steve was now kneeling beside his bathtub with Sophus on one side of him and Eleanor on the other, and the archivist behind him holding a syringe filled with DoorWay, the tip of the needle pressing against Steve’s cervical artery.

  However, it didn’t explain the presence of the treasurer. Ann’s face was smeared with mud. Her expression was one of silent fury.

  Eleanor regarded them both with evident satisfaction and said, ‘Take this idiot’—she indicated Steve—‘and this treasurer’—she nodded at Ann—‘to the top of the hill. Take them before Gorgon.’

  40

  Danyl tries to out-think the dog

  Danyl crashed into the door and bounced off it. His jaw and genitals sustained most of the impact, and he pivoted and stumbled directly towards the dog who was astonished to see the door slam shut and her target reverse direction. Her claws scrambled on the smooth tiles and her hindquarters swung as she pitched over into a controlled slide, snapping at Danyl’s legs as he leapt over her in a desperate but successful star-jump.

  He landed and ran towards the kitchen. When he reached the doorway he turned and screamed, ‘Steve?’

  Steve did not reply. The dog clambered to its feet and snarled at Danyl.

  ‘Steve!’

  The dog lunged. Danyl fled. He jumped onto the long bench running down the centre of the room. His plan was to sprint to the end and leap for the jagged hole in the roof then pull himself up into the bathroom and cower in terror until Steve rescued him. But the dog anticipated all of this. It ran to the end of the bench, easily outpacing Danyl, and stood on its hind legs with its front paws on the countertop, grinning
at him.

  Elevation. He needed elevation. Fast. He backed away from the dog while it watched him with glistening brown eyes. It thought Danyl was trapped. If he jumped off the bench it would run him down in seconds. There was nowhere else to go.

  But there was. Danyl feinted to the left. The dog dropped down and ran to the left side of the counter, so Danyl jumped to the right. He splashed his way across the floor, over the half-submerged, staring bodies of the blue-lipped pilgrims, to the pile of concrete and sheets of Perspex stacked against the wall. He clambered to the top of the pile. The dog tried to jump after him but Danyl pulled a wobbly sheet of Perspex out from under him and held it up as a shield. The dog’s snout collided with the sheet in a smeared tableau of fangs and nostrils and drool. It fell back and jumped up again, but Danyl’s shield held firm.

  The dog paced back and forth. She did not look worried. She knew Danyl was trapped on top of the pile, that he had nowhere to go. She sat, looked up at him and panted happily.

  Danyl smiled back. This dog thought it was better than him, but she was probably wrong. Danyl could use reason and symbols and tools. All the dog could do was run fast and crush his bones between her jaws.

  He gripped the Perspex and wobbled it. He looked at the hole in the roof, which was about three metres away. The sheet of Perspex was about three metres long.

  Danyl wasn’t an engineer or a materials scientist. He was just a writer trapped by a dog. But he was pretty sure there were building codes and minimum standards for construction materials such that any discarded Perspex left lying around should be able to bear the weight of an adult male crawling through mid-air above a savage animal. So he shifted his grip on the Perspex and, grunting with effort, manoeuvred the far end into place and slid it through the hole. After that it was a simple matter of inching along the sheet while it bent under Danyl’s weight and the dog leapt high into the air and grabbed the hem of his trousers in her jaw and tried to drag him down. His face pressed onto the Perspex as he gripped its edges with both hands, and he saw it begin to crack; flaws were appearing millimetres away from his face and spreading out with a cascade of tiny crackling sounds, then the fabric of his trousers ripped and the dog dropped back down to the floor and uttered a frustrated, sorrowful growl as the sheet sprang up again, waves wobbling along its disintegrating length.

  Danyl scuttled forward, his screams rising and falling with the undulation of the sheet, and then he was through the hole in the roof, his arms clutching the twisted beams, pulling himself up into the wet, sunlit bathroom where he lay on his back and panted in time with the dog’s loud panting below and his heart thrashed in his chest like a suffocating fish.

  After a while his breathing calmed and his heart slowed. He was lying on something hard and sharp that was digging into his back. He sat up and discovered he’d been lying on Steve’s crowbar. They must have left it here when the bath collapsed through the floor. Finally, a lucky break.

  It took a few minutes of precision jimmying and smashing to force the bathroom door open; eventually the wooden joints crackled and gave way. A block of timber was jammed between the door and the floor on the other side. Danyl forced the crowbar through the gap and poked at it. It gave, and the door opened.

  The room beyond was empty except for three single mattresses on the floor. The light came in through a window in the east wall, looking out on the trees rising up the flank of the hill. A second window faced the Threshold development, but it was boarded up. There was another door in the far wall. It opened onto the landing: stairs leading down to the foyer. Danyl closed it hurriedly. He didn’t know much about dogs, but he was pretty sure they could climb stairs.

  As he moved towards the window, his shoes made a crackling sound, like slow tap-dancing. There was something sticky underfoot. The floor was littered with screwed-up pieces of paper and dozens of empty plastic vials, all embedded in a dry brown pool radiating from one of the mattresses, which had a dull reddish stain at one end. Danyl knelt and touched his fingertips to the floor then sniffed them. Blood.

  He picked up a vial. It was the size of his little finger, empty, with a blue residue.

  Three people had lain in here taking DoorWay. Travelling to the Real City. One of them had been wounded while they lay. They’d lost a lot of blood. Danyl remembered the freshly dug grave atop the plateau.

  He wondered what happened to your mind if you died while you were in the Real City.

  He picked up a piece of paper and unscrewed it. It shed a rain of brown flakes like insect skins, revealing a map: a scrawled diagram of the Real City. The other side of the page was covered in dense, printed text. It was hard to read through the creasing and the blood. Danyl held it up to the window and the letters swam into focus.

  It was a page from his book.

  41

  Sophus and Ann

  They formed an odd procession. Eleanor led them across the patch of weeds to the road. Ann followed, her hands cuffed behind her back. She glanced back at Sophus as if she were about to speak, but shook her head and resumed her trudge up the slope, heading towards the house at the top of the hill.

  Sophus carried the front of Steve’s bath. Steve was behind him and the archivist took up the rear. Progress was slow. The bath was heavy and the driveway was steep and muddy. Each time they stumbled the bath slipped from their fingers and fell in the mud, and Steve had to brace himself to stop it from sliding back down the hill and dragging him with it. And each time this happened Ann glanced back at Sophus, and Sophus looked at her, and then at Eleanor, and his expression grew grim.

  Steve’s training as a psychologist told him that something strange was happening. Why was Ann here? Why was she being taken to Gorgon? He decided to investigate. To probe, subtly. He called out, ‘You there, treasurer. Why are you here?’

  ‘She’s not just a treasurer,’ Sophus snapped. ‘She’s Professor Ann Day. Show some respect.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You’ve never heard of Ann Day? The brilliant mathematical philosopher?’

  ‘No. Should I have?’

  Sophus shook his head in disbelief. ‘She’s an international superstar of differential topology. The queen of sympleptic geometry.’

  ‘Not anymore,’ Ann interjected, her voice weary. ‘I used to be those things, but I gave it all up. I retired. He’s right—I’m nobody now. Just a simple treasurer.’

  ‘Why did you retire?’

  ‘She won’t tell you,’ Sophus said. ‘She won’t tell anyone. She was at the highest vertex of the polyhedron of her career, and she stepped down. She said she was done with mathematics forever, then she disappeared.’

  Steve asked, ‘Why?’

  ‘She won’t tell you,’ Sophus repeated, and Ann bowed her head.

  ‘How do you know so much about her?’

  ‘I studied her work when I was a graduate student,’ Sophus replied. ‘I read her final, baffling paper on Gaussian curvature in higher dimensional spaces. It was brilliant, but also disturbing. It seemed she was moving towards a final breakthrough. Something that would change everything we think we know about curves. But it also seemed that she was holding something back. She was hiding something, some key insight. And then she announced that her career was over, and she vanished. I decided to find her.

  ‘I tracked her here, to Te Aro. I moved here to learn from her. But she rejected me. Oh, she gave me a scholarship and a hovel to live in while I finished my thesis, in exchange for my silence. But she refused to discuss her work, or why she abandoned it. Instead she warned me about the peril of new ideas. Her work was dangerous, she claimed. A threat to civilisation. Possibly to all of existence!

  ‘I was furious with her. What kind of world would we live in if thinkers refused to publicise our ideas simply because they are incredibly dangerous? Little did she know that her refusal to share her insights would lead me to an even greater discovery.

  ‘One night, after we fought, I went out and walked the streets of Te Aro. T
hat is when I discovered the clues that lead me to the most important discovery in the history of mathematics. The Real City.’

  ‘The Real City isn’t what you think it is,’ Ann replied, her voice a wretched mumble.

  Steve asked, ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s an artefact of pure mathematics,’ Sophus said. ‘It’s a solution to the oldest unsolved problem in philosophy. The problem of mathematical reality. My work on the topology of the City goes beyond anything Ann dreamed of. And we haven’t even reached the Spiral yet, which is technically not even a spiral, but a geometric curve called a cardioid.’

  Eleanor snorted. She’d listened to their conversation while she led them up the hill towards Gorgon’s house, and now she rounded on Sophus. ‘Do you still think the Real City is some kind of geometry problem? An equation you can solve? That if we reach the Spiral you’ll be able to publish some meaningless proof? Go ahead and believe that if it makes you happy. But the City is only a means to an end. It and you are part of Gorgon’s work to free humanity from the tyranny of the world of forms and change. Once her work is finished and we reach the Spiral, you won’t care about mathematics, or philosophy. Everything will be explained, and nothing will be explained. All will be both light and darkness, wisdom and mystery. That is the Real City.’

  Then Ann said in a quiet, miserable voice, ‘You’re both wrong. The Real City is a trap.’

  And she told them her story.

  42

  Lacunae

  Danyl watched the procession make its way up the hill. The window looking out over the wastes of Threshold was boarded up, but someone had drilled a circle in the board at head height. A spy-hole. Danyl spied through it now, watching as Steve, Sophus and the archivist wrestled with the bathtub. Eleanor turned to address them, and Ann, looking miserable, replied.

  What was Ann doing there? Why was she being taken to Gorgon’s house? Danyl didn’t know, but he knew he had to rescue her. And Steve. But how? The group was guarded. The hillside swarmed with Cartographers. And Steve was still chained to the bathtub. Impossible.