Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  It was dark. Scattered torches were rolling on the floor, illuminating yet more grunting, copulating couples. The beams of light picked out rolling eyes, webs of undulating flesh, contorting orifices. He stumbled through it all, falling over unseen forms, struggling to free himself as they clawed at him; all the while the giant and Ann coming closer and closer.

  Danyl knew where he was going. Sophus had drawn them a map of the tunnels, and he was following the route to Threshold. But what would he do when he reached it? He could stay ahead of the giant while he was weaving about in the darkness, but once he was out in the open, with nowhere to hide, he’d be in trouble.

  He wriggled out from underneath a thin but very strong woman who was trying to straddle his head, picked up a torch and dashed down a side tunnel. It was mostly empty. The few rutting fiends Danyl encountered were dazzled by his torchlight. They covered their eyes as he passed and then returned to befouling each other in the darkness.

  In the catacombs, the sounds of the great orgy were muted. Danyl could hear the roar of the underground stream in the distance. He headed towards it. His breathing was ragged. His legs were heavy. The giant’s footsteps were drawing closer.

  And then he was running along the accessway. He found the steps leading to the culvert and fled up them. He was outside in Threshold now, the slope stretching into the darkness above him, his breath steaming in the torchlight.

  Onwards. He puffed his way up the hill, heading for the lights and the screams of the nearest townhouse—the same building he’d stumbled into only two days earlier, frozen and near death. Now Danyl was alive, but not likely to remain so for long. He looked back. The giant was clear of the culvert and approaching fast. Not even running, just striding up the slope, his huge gait closing the distance.

  Danyl reached the townhouse. He ran through the door and into yet another orgy. The sounds and the stench of body odour, copulation and stale urine sent him reeling. All of the pilgrims were awake now, clawing at each other with vile abandon. Someone grabbed at Danyl. He fell and landed on a trio of copulating men. He skidded across their hairy, sweat-soaked backs and came to rest on a mattress.

  The giant stooped and entered the room. He saw Danyl and came after him, scattering the men before him like fleshy pink leaves.

  Danyl fled through the crowd. He wasn’t running blind anymore. He was looking for someone, checking the face of each moaning, thrusting, blue-lipped demon, peering over and poking his head inside tangles of limbs, pressing his face to the ground to identify each person he passed.

  But it was no good. These faces were all unfamiliar, and the giant was too fast. Finally, he wrapped his hand around Danyl’s leg and hauled him high into the air, ready to dash his mind out with his head-sized fist. Just then, upside-down Danyl glimpsed what he’d been looking for: the delicate elfin face and almond eyes of Joy, the giant’s girlfriend.

  Danyl saw her for only a second before she was eclipsed by a mound of thrusting white buttocks, but it was enough. He slapped at the giant’s arm and cried out, ‘Stop! I see Joy! I see Joy!’

  The giant looked amused. ‘Enough lies, little thief.’ It prepared to strike. Danyl twisted himself in mid-air and pointed, screaming. ‘It’s no lie. I swear! She’s right there!’

  The buttocks parted again and Joy’s face appeared, her lips curled back in savage ecstasy. The giant gasped. He lowered his arm and ran towards Joy, dragging Danyl behind him. He picked up several men and tossed them through the air, uncovering the pale slender frame of his girlfriend.

  The giant raised Danyl before his face, and his voice broke. ‘Thank you, little man.’ Then he tossed Danyl aside and clutched his girlfriend to his chest, sobbing.

  Danyl rolled onto his side and lay on a mattress for a moment, panting. His head was buzzing: probably from the stress of being chased through an orgy by a giant. But he was safe now. Unless Ann caught him. He climbed onto his knees and looked around for her. He found her standing directly behind him in the act of swinging her golf club towards his head.

  Danyl was too exhausted to duck. Instead he tipped his head back and the tip of the club grazed his forehead. He yelped. Ann swung again, but her foot slipped in one of the pools of semen on the floor. Her swing went wide and the club connected with the leering, bestial face of a bald, bearded hairy man who had been creeping up on Danyl from behind. The man fell backwards, screaming, still masturbating, and landed on a flock of women who swarmed over him in an instant. Ann was off-balance now. Danyl stepped forward and shoved her. She screeched and tipped over as two men fellating each other rolled into the back of her knees. Her golf club flew into the air and a tide of heaving flesh carried her away. Danyl staggered to the exit.

  He emerged into the fresh night air. The rain had stopped. A gap in the clouds revealed a small, bright moon. It lit up the pathway winding up the hill. The lights were on in most of the buildings and the screams of the orgy floated through the air. But the path itself was empty. The way to Gorgon’s house was clear.

  Danyl reached the roadway and headed up the hill. He wondered what had happened to Steve.

  57

  Lightbringer

  Dog was strong. She was fast and well trained and intelligent. Her jaws were powerful. She lay on top of Steve, pinning him to the ground, his left arm gripped between her teeth.

  The grip tightened whenever he moved. His taser was gone. He’d dropped it when he fell. He’d lost Lightbringer too—it had spun off into the darkness when the dog took him.

  Steve hated to admit this but he was no match for the dog. Not in a straight fight. His superhuman reflexes were no good when he was trapped beneath a heavy, panting, sharp-fanged beast that could crush his forearm and tear out his throat. No. Steve needed to trick the dog. Outwit it. And he’d have to do so quickly.

  A low groan came from the muddy darkness beyond the open door. Eleanor was recovering from her taser shock. Steve had only a few minutes to act before she was able to stand and stagger up the hill and call for help.

  He turned his head and looked into the dog’s huge brown eyes. What was she thinking? What was thought even like for a dog? Human cognition worked in terms of language and static images, but dogs had no language and their eyes had evolved to track movement, not to perceive their surroundings. They thought in terms of sound and smell and motion: when they thought about the future, they formed dense imaginary tapestries of scents and noises and objects in flux. That was how the dog thought and that was how Steve would defeat her.

  He slid his hand down the side of his body. The dog heard this: tiny muscles in her erect, furry ears twitched and the ear closest to the noise rotated towards it, monitoring the sound; but the dog did nothing. The movements were too slight to be an escape attempt or a prelude to violence.

  Or so she thought. Steve’s fingers reached his trouser pocket. His questing fingertips found the vial containing the sedative. He pulled it free, keeping his breathing very slow and measured. Steve had powerful finger muscles: it was a simple matter for him to uncap the vial without moving his arm. The dog’s ears twitched and its damp nose quivered in response, but it took no action. The odd scent of the drug and the tiny motions of its quarry didn’t combine in its mind to form any immediate threat.

  Now Steve raised the vial. The dog saw the motion. Her grip on Steve’s arm tightened slightly, her fangs pressing through the black fabric of his jacket; she made a low, growling noise in her throat. Steve froze. The vial occupied the mid-point between the dog’s face and his own.

  A fit of coughing erupted from Eleanor. She rolled onto her hands and knees. Steve took advantage of this distraction to tip the vial. The liquid dripped out and soaked into the sleeve of his jacket, already wet with drool. The dark pool of the drug permeated his sleeve, disappearing into the region of his arm enclosed by the dog’s hot, wet mouth.

  The dog, thinking it had defeated him, was hyper-salivating with pride. Uptake of the substance through its tongue and gums would be qui
ck. Steve’s eyes flicked to Eleanor, who was now kneeling: she’d fished her phone out of the mud and activated it. She dropped it again when another coughing fit struck.

  How long would the sedative take to subdue the dog? Steve performed a lightning calculation: he didn’t know what the drug was, but the giant had estimated it would knock out about twenty Cartographers—many of them adult males—within about five minutes of them ingesting it. The dog was only one dog and she was about half the weight of a male Cartographer, but she was absorbing the drug through her gums instead of eating it. So, assuming the drug was a classical benzodiazepine, roughly ten millilitres administered, about half of which had soaked into his coat, and the rest mingled with the

  rainwater …

  Steve estimated it would knock out the dog in ten to fifteen seconds, which was roughly the time he’d spent performing that calculation. And, indeed, the dog’s eyelids were sinking, her grip on his arm loosening. He felt the heavy body lying atop him go slack, the force pinning him transforming into a dead weight.

  He sat up and tried to push the animal aside. Immediately her eyes flicked open, great gouts of steaming dog breath shot from her mouth and nostrils, and her jaw clamped down on his arm. Steve bellowed, outraged that the creature had defied his biochemical calculations and also distressed by the incredible pain in his forearm as the dog slowly crushed it.

  The screaming distracted Eleanor. She’d come to her senses in a daze. She remembered walking up the path towards Gorgon’s house; she’d heard a sound behind her, turned, and then—a flurry of movement. Pain. Darkness. And now she was halfway across the hillside and covered in mud. There were screams coming from almost every building on the hillside. Horrible screams coming from hundreds of screamers. Something had gone wrong.

  Then Steve’s yelling drew her attention. That imbecile was here. And he was wrestling with Gorgon’s dog. An empty vial lay on the grass beside them. And then she understood everything. She remembered seeing an identical vial in the laboratory: right next to the beakers filled with compound. That idiot had done something to the new batch of DoorWay and now the pilgrims were waking. Disaster.

  Eleanor had sought the Spiral for most of her life. It was the gate to all mystery. The way which was not the way. And Verity was her companion in that search. Ever since that childhood morning, many years ago now, when the two girls had crept onto the abandoned farm: past the police tape, the farm house, the empty fields, the trees with huge dew-lined spiderwebs floating between them like ghosts. Finally, they’d arrived at the barn. Eleanor remembered it as if it were yesterday.

  The tin walls caught the light of the sunrise, and walking towards it was like approaching a sheet of cold flame. Then they were inside, in the darkness. The floor was dirt. There were wooden benches piled high with incomprehensible tools and instruments. Bottles of chemicals. Vats. Water baths. There was a strange smell in the air.

  There were books on one of the benches. Reference texts. Chemistry manuals. Beside them was a photograph in a cheap plastic frame. It showed a hillside dotted with half-built buildings, with a house at the top of the slope. Three figures stood in the foreground. A man, a girl about the same age as Eleanor and Verity, and a young boy.

  Then a tree creaked outside and both girls were afraid. What were they doing in such a dangerous, lonely place? What if the scientist came back? Or the police caught them? Would they send them to prison? Eleanor almost ran but then the sun reached the window and a watery light flooded the room, illuminating a huge diagram sprawled across a wall of the barn.

  The Spiral.

  The girls stood transfixed, staring. It was vast and impossible and alien. The man who lived here must have drawn it, they agreed. But no human could ever have imagined such a sacred and monstrous thing. He must have rendered it from life; must have seen it somewhere. But where? Verity took her journal from her pocket and sketched a crude reproduction of the thing. A copy of a copy. She was almost finished when they heard the rumble of an engine outside. Men’s voices. Eleanor dragged her gaze from the Spiral and ran to the window.

  The police were coming. They had a bulldozer. Beside it, a dozen policemen walked along the dirt track, carrying rifles. They were here to destroy the barn.

  Eleanor grabbed Verity and dragged her to the far door. They fled just seconds before the huge metal plate of the bulldozer tore through a wall and the building collapsed behind them. They made it to the safety of the trees and looked back. No one had seen them. A broken fragment of the Spiral poked from the ruins, then the bulldozer nudged the debris and it crumbled apart.

  They sought the Spiral for almost ten years. But they had almost nothing to look for. An impossible image. A man’s name: Simon. A half-glimpsed photograph. Eventually they fought, and Verity abandoned the search. Abandoned Eleanor. Abandoned herself, losing her identity in drinking and drugs.

  Eleanor turned to meditation. Mysticism. Faith. She continued to seek the Spiral, but it was Verity who found it, and who brought Simon Ogilvy back to Te Aro.

  Simon had spent decades trying to synthesise the DoorWay compound. But with the help of Eleanor and Verity he finally succeeded, and the three of them reached the Real City. They hid in one of the Threshold buildings, unseen by the occupant of the house at the top of the slope. They spent several blissful months mapping the City, trying to find a path to the Spiral. But all that ended one sunny afternoon when Eleanor left Simon and Verity alone for a few hours and returned to find Simon in a coma, the side of his head smashed in. An old woman with tangled grey hair stood over them, the gigantic dog that patrolled Threshold at her side.

  ‘He’s in a coma,’ the woman explained. ‘The Adversary attacked him.’

  ‘He’s dying,’ Eleanor said. ‘We need to get him to a hospital.’

  ‘We can’t take him to the hospital,’ the woman replied. ‘The way is opening.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘His mind is trapped in the Real City.’

  ‘How do you know? Who are you?’

  Then Verity, kneeling on the floor beside Simon’s battered form, looked up. Her hands were soaked in blood, her face streaked with tears. ‘We’ve been wrong about everything,’ she said to Eleanor. ‘Everything we thought about the Spiral. About the Real City. Everything Simon told us. It was all wrong.’

  ‘Wrong?’ Eleanor snorted. ‘That’s nonsense. We’ve been seeking the Spiral all our lives. How could we be wrong? Who is this?’

  Verity pointed a trembling bloody finger at the white-haired woman. ‘This is who Simon warned us about,’ she whispered. ‘This is Gorgon.’

  Eleanor swore as she unlocked her new phone, tapping through the unfamiliar interface. Her old phone had vanished a few days ago. She thought she’d merely lost it; but maybe that too had been part of the Adversary’s evil plot? The device beeped cheerfully; she pressed the number to dial the laboratory. Hopefully someone would answer. Hopefully there was still time to prevent the contaminated DoorWay from going to all the pilgrims. Hopefully she could still save the universe.

  Steve shouted again. She turned her back on him. The dog had that idiot under control. The phone was ringing. Would the laboratory even pick up?

  Then the phone connected. Someone answered. One of Gorgon’s former clerks from the bookshop. He sounded terrified. There was screaming in the background. He babbled at Eleanor, but she silenced him. ‘Stop. Listen. Do what I say.’ Then she dropped the phone and collapsed into the mud, twitching and seizing. She’d landed at a right angle to Steve, who lay at her feet. The drooling, half-drugged body of the dog lay atop him. Steve’s outstretched hand found his taser. He clutched it to him.

  He pulled Eleanor’s jacket off her and used it to tie a tourniquet around his half-eaten arm. Then he tugged the drugged dog and the stunned woman through the double doors, into the darkened building he’d escaped from with Danyl and a bathtub only a few hours earlier. The pilgrims were gone. Someone must have cleared them out after the flood.

&nb
sp; He took his torch from his pocket, switched it on and set it on the floor with the beam aimed at the ceiling. He tugged a length of power cable out of the wall, braced with his feet and yanked it loose. He used this to bind the dog’s paws. Next he tied up Eleanor. Finally, he switched off his torch and stood in the darkness. The pilgrims’ screams were distant now. Muted by the walls. He could hear water: it dripped from the jagged hole in the ceiling, pattering on the concrete floor.

  Steve rubbed his mutilated arm. What was he to do? He couldn’t storm Gorgon’s house. He’d never make it up the ladder. Should he leave Threshold, go to an all-night pharmacy, get a rabies shot, some anti-bacterial cream and some bandages on his arm? No, that was the coward’s way out. He could go and look for Danyl. But searching Threshold in the dark and the rain while it was crawling with armed Cartographers and sprawling orgies would be dangerous, even for Steve.

  He stood and thought, and listened to the dripping water and the panting of the dog, and the distant screams. After a few seconds his heightened pattern recognition abilities noticed that the dripping produced an irregular echo. When a drop of water dropped, the sound sometimes repeated itself a few seconds later.

  Steve switched on his torch again and entered the kitchen.

  When he and Danyl had escaped from the upstairs bathroom by collapsing the floor, all the water had poured down onto this level of the building. But now it had drained away. The water dripping from the jagged gap in the ceiling dripped onto the shattered concrete. Steve stood beneath the gap, lighting up the beads of moisture with his torch. He tracked them as they fell. Some drops of water landed on the broken region of the floor where Steve had crash-landed in the bath. Little rivulets of water ran down the shards of concrete then dropped into the darkness, producing a second dripping sound.

  Steve knelt over the cracks and held his hand above them. He felt a strong, cool breeze. He thought about the stipulation in Ogilvy’s will: No excavation of any kind must ever take place beneath Threshold. Its secrets must remain buried.