Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  ‘The valley is filled with hidden pathways,’ Steve explained. ‘Only the wise know them all.’

  They stopped to rest again when they reached the corner of Ohiro Road and Aro Street. This was the busiest region of the valley: cars drove by, pedestrians bustled about. Single-storey houses lined the road; behind them loomed a row of apartment buildings and tenement towers built in an assortment of styles, from irritably cheerful art deco to soothing, featureless expanses of steel and concrete. The tallest and ugliest of these structures was eight storeys high, a synthesis of opaque black windows and unpainted cement: it cast a deep shadow over the adjacent streets and buildings.

  Danyl regarded it with fear. There were eyes watching from the top floor of that tower, he knew. Eyes monitoring the valley, scrutinising its inhabitants. Eyes that were especially hostile to Danyl, and very, very interested in the contents of his box.

  He had been foolish to come this way. Danyl rebuked himself: he’d been distracted by thoughts of Verity and shaken by the events of the morning—his victorious brawl with the elderly man, the police pursuit—and his inattention had caused him to stray into enemy territory. He stood and tugged Steve’s sleeve. ‘Let’s move on.’

  ‘Wait.’ Steve held up his hand. ‘I’m just thinking about something.’

  ‘Thinking? About what?’

  ‘Something important.’

  ‘Your thesis?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘We need to leave. Now.’

  ‘Hssst.’

  Danyl gritted his teeth and waited while Steve stared off into space. He glanced back at the tower. It was set back from the street, surrounded by a high wall and reached via a driveway running between two apartment buildings. A gate topped with razor-wire barred admittance. The gate was closed.

  Danyl turned to Steve and pleaded, ‘Can you hurry this up?’

  Steve flicked his hand dismissively. His eyes widened, and then narrowed. His lips moved but made no sound. Danyl shifted nervously. He switched his gaze from Steve to the tower and back again. Steve’s head drifted downwards in a diagonal motion, then snapped back up and his eyes focused. He announced, ‘I’m done.’

  ‘Take that end.’ Danyl lifted his corner of the box. He looked over at the gate. They would have to walk right past the entrance.

  Which was opening.

  He watched in horror as the gate shuddered and slid aside, moving with slow, robotic grace. Panic clawed at him. He dropped his end of the box, grabbed Steve’s arm and pulled him down behind it, hissing, ‘Hide.’

  They crouched below the rim. An elderly woman walking a little white dog walked past and glanced at them without curiosity.

  ‘What’s happening? Is it the law?’ Steve poked his head up and peered about. ‘I don’t see them.’

  ‘It’s worse than the law.’ Danyl cursed. They were so close. Less than ten minutes from his front door and now this. ‘There’s a gate up ahead on the other side of the road.’ He spoke in a whisper. ‘It’s opening. Take a look and tell me what you see.’

  Steve peeked over the top of the box. ‘I see the gate. There’s a white van driving out of it. It’s turning onto the road. It’s coming towards us.’

  ‘Move!’

  They shuffled around to the side of the box facing away from the street. The van drew level with them: Danyl saw it reflected in the window-panes of the adjacent house: it was white with tinted black windows. It rumbled by, moving slowly, then sped up and rounded the corner heading deeper into the valley.

  Danyl peered around the side of the box. The gate slid shut, moving on automated rollers triggered by some remote mechanism.

  He stood. His hands shook. He wiped them on his T-shirt and said, ‘We shouldn’t have come this way. Let’s get out of here. We’ll go through the park.’

  They picked up the box and carried it through the entrance to Te Aro Park. The air smelled of pot, as usual: several suspect groups sat beneath the trees, some of them chanting softly in languages not readily identifiable. They followed the path, past yogis and tai-chi masters and a middle-aged man whispering to his dog and crying. When they were alone Steve said, ‘What happened back there?’

  They set the box down and Danyl pointed to the tower: it loomed over the trees. He said, ‘That’s where the white van came from. It’s where the driveway behind the gate leads. Do you know who lives in that building?’

  ‘Everybody knows.‘ Steve blinked at Danyl. ‘But no one ever sees him. He never leaves that tower. How do you know him? And why are you hiding from him?’ His gaze flicked to the box and he nodded in comprehension. ‘I see. Sort of. What’s in there?’

  Steve was always that much smarter than you wanted him to be. Danyl gave an insincere little laugh. ‘Isn’t it funny that you walked all the way to the end of the valley, helped me carry this box back from Holloway, fled from the police and only now wonder what’s inside it.’

  Steve laughed too. ‘It is funny,’ he agreed. He stopped laughing. ‘What’s inside it?’

  Danyl hesitated. He looked around the park again. The trees cast long shadows across the lawn. A man in a dressing-gown and slippers walked by with a newspaper tucked under his arm, sipping from a can of beer. There were no obvious threats.

  How much could he tell Steve? He said, ‘This box—’ He thought he saw movement, high in the windows of the tower. They needed to get out of the open. ‘Help me carry it home,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll show you what’s inside. We’ll take the old road.’

  The old road ran along the valley floor, parallel to lower Devon Street. It was abandoned some decades ago due to a tendency to flood in winter. In summer it was covered in knee-high grass and lined with flowering trees: pohutukawa and azaleas and kowhai. The houses of Devon Street were barely visible through the canopy, just glimpses of white walls and tiled roofs. They walked along it in silence, passing through a clearing and climbing over a fallen tree and through a gap in the fence leading to Danyl’s backyard.

  They were sweating heavily now: the air was heavy and warm, and they grunted like angry beasts as they manhandled the box across the chaotic terrain of Danyl’s overgrown garden and through his back door into the kitchen. They set it down on the wooden floor and pushed it down the hall, stopping midway outside a door.

  Danyl opened it, revealing a tiny closet. ‘In there,’ he said.

  The closet was empty. There was a door handle set in the back wall. Danyl reached in and turned it and the wall swung backwards revealing a narrow windowless room extending to the end of the house.

  ‘Wow.’ Steve stepped through the closet and examined the space. ‘It’s like a secret passage.’

  ‘It’s not a passage. Passages lead somewhere.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  Danyl said, ‘I don’t know. Verity called it the room-between-rooms. She kept her old clothes in here.’

  ‘How intriguing.’ Steve investigated the space. The walls were made from bare wooden boards. The ceiling was low. There was no light socket: the only illumination spilled through from the hall. It was empty except for an old pair of Danyl’s shoes and a few items of discarded female clothing. There was a faint smell of petrol.

  They dragged the box through the closet and into the empty room. Danyl brushed the top of the box with his fingertips, noticing again how much larger it was than he remembered.

  ‘Open it up then,’ said Steve. ‘Let’s see what the big secret is.’

  Danyl tugged at the tape on the lid, peeling it back: exposing the flaps, which were emblazoned with the logo of the AAAAAA storage company. Which was strange, now that he thought about it, because his box didn’t come from a storage company. And, he was pretty sure, his box was smaller. All the evidence pointed to one horrible, horrible conclusion.

  He flipped back the lid and looked inside. It was filled with books and folders, on
top of which sat a large red brick, blackened at one end. None of these things belonged to Danyl, who announced, ‘This is not my box.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Steve.

  ‘Oh, this is unbelievable.’ Danyl dug down through the contents. More books. A photo album. Scrapbooks filled with clippings. ‘Simply. Unbelievable. Verity put the wrong box out. And you know what happens next? This’ll be my fault, somehow, and she’ll expect me carry this all the way back to that decrepit hovel, then carry my real box all the way back here. Well, we’ll see about that.’ Danyl took his mobile phone from his back pocket and dialled Verity’s number.

  Steve peered into the box. He grunted to get Danyl’s attention and said, ‘This is interesting.’

  He picked up the photo album and flipped through it, fanning the pages. They were black-and-white pictures, dating—Danyl guessed—back to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Some of the photos were old street scenes of Te Aro, but most of them were group portraits showing men and women dressed in odd ceremonial outfits reminiscent of ancient Egypt. They were arranged into formal poses, holding aloft golden cups and wooden staves. One picture showed a young woman standing against a stone wall: she was dressed in a white robe, and carved into the wall above her head was an image of a baboon greeting the sun.

  ‘Spirituality,’ Steve said. ‘Hermetic occultism. People were crazy about this stuff in the late Victorian era.’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘Why does Verity have this? Is your ex-girlfriend a hermetic occultist? And these books are all in German. Does she understand German?’

  ‘Oh, who knows what she gets up to. I imagine it’s something to do with her work at the gallery,’ Danyl said, working an angry sneer into his words. ‘Some installation or exhibit or performance project. And she’s not even answering her phone.’ His call went through to her voicemail: would he like to leave a message? He hung up.

  ‘Interesting,’ Steve said yet again. He put the photo album back in the box and taped the lid shut, and they filed out of the room-between-rooms. Danyl closed the first door behind them, and then shut the closet, leaving the box alone in the darkness.

  ~

  It was night when he woke. Danyl turned on the bedside light and checked the time on his phone: 10 pm. He’d slept away the dead hours of the late afternoon and evening and he felt refreshed and content. Now for dinner, maybe some TV, and he’d be ready for a decent night’s sleep. He got up and rummaged around in a pile of laundry, put on a pair of socks and, otherwise unclothed, went downstairs to the kitchen to forage.

  The kitchen was his favourite room in the house. Wooden benches, white plaster walls and an old stone sink: it looked just as it must have when they built it a hundred years ago. Except for the oven and the power outlets. And the kettle and the toaster. And the fridge. Anyway, it had character. Danyl wondered who had lived in his house back then. A family? A couple with children, teenage daughters perhaps, who chased each other around this very room in flimsy white cotton nightgowns that were transparent in the flickering candlelight? Yes, he was sure they did.

  His toast popped. He buttered it, filled a mug with hot water and miso soup powder, stuck a piece of toast in his mouth and held the other between his fingers and made his way back down the hall, stopping halfway down.

  The door to the hallway closet was open.

  He splashed hot soup on his bare belly in shock. That door was closed when he passed it a minute ago. He peered around the doorway. The rear wall was also open, revealing the room-between-rooms. The box was a vague black shape squatting malignantly in the darkness.

  He was sure he had shut both doors, locked the damn thing away so he didn’t have to look at it, and think about Verity, the contents of his real box—the one he was supposed to bring home—and the mess he’d made of his life. He stepped into the room-between-rooms and peered about. Nothing. Perhaps the door blew open in the breeze? He pulled it shut but it stuck: there was something trapped between the door and the frame. It was an old running shoe, its laces tangled up with its twin.

  Danyl looked at the shoe and sneered at it. Running! Exercise! That was Steve’s cure for clinical depression. The man was a total fraud. He kicked the shoes into the hallway, closed both sets of doors and stamped back to the kitchen, where he poured the remains of his soup in the sink, tossed the toast in the bin, then trudged back up the stairs, his formerly temperate mood now black. He sat on the edge of his bed, the spilled soup congealing on the downy fur of his belly.

  What now? His appetite was gone. He was too upset to watch TV or read. What else was there but sleep?

  Sleep. He looked longingly at the rumpled sheets. But Verity had ruined even that for him, ruined it with her reckless talk about clinical depression. A philosopher—Danyl was pretty sure it was Schopenhauer—once said: ‘If life were happy and pleasant then people would dread sleep and welcome the new morning, but instead the reverse is true.’ How perceptive! How right! But, he brooded, how typical a thing for a depressed person to think.

  He lay on his side. He thought about Verity. He thought about the derelict house. He thought about the box. He thought about the room-between-rooms, and the running shoes on the hallway floor and sneered again. Psychology: it wasn’t even a real science.

  And yet. Last year, back when he met Verity, when life was good, Danyl went running every morning. Up at sunrise, through the city; along the waterfront then home again and ready to work all day. He even ran in the depths of winter. Then he remembered a moment of wild joy running along the waterfront with the waves crashing over the sea-wall, drenching him, the last man out in the storm. A great moment to be alive.

  Maybe living like that was better than lying alone in the darkness covered in soup. Maybe Steve had something there after all. Danyl got out of bed, found his phone and sent a text offering to run with him at dawn.

  It was the right move. Danyl felt it. Verity was more likely to come back to him if he spent his day running and writing instead of sleeping and crying. He walked downstairs and found his shoes and lined them up by the doorway along with his running clothes. Then he yawned and stretched and returned to his bed, optimistic—for the first time in months—about the day to come.

  3

  The first day of the rest of Danyl’s life

  Danyl screamed, ‘I think it’s shattered. I can see the bone beneath the skin.’

  ‘That’s your ankle joint,’ said Steve. ‘It’s supposed to look like that. Your leg looks OK—’

  Danyl screamed again. ‘The pain! I feel sick.’ Steve helped him stagger to a bench near the bottom of Epuni St where he half-sat, half-lay on the seat, breathing raggedly.

  ‘We made pretty good time for a while there.’ Steve contemplated Danyl’s house, visible in the medium distance. ‘You want me to call an ambulance?’

  ‘Everything’s going dark.’ Danyl sucked in his breath. ‘That means yes.’

  Steve nodded and jogged back towards Devon Street, where he lived a few doors up and over the road from Danyl, but turned around in the middle of the street and lumbered back.

  ‘It just occurred to me,’ he said. ‘It’s a really bad time to go to the emergency ward.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s Sunday morning. End of the graveyard shift, a skeleton staff still dealing with all the drunks and assaults from Saturday night—’

  ‘Today is Wednesday, imbecile.’

  ‘I like to think I know what day it is.’

  Danyl closed his eyes and pressed his face against the cool, dew-dabbled wood of the bench. This had been a horrible mistake.

  ‘I know where to go.’ Danyl’s eyelids flickered. Steve continued, ‘There’s a doctor’s surgery, like, two minutes down the road.’

  ‘Doctor’s surgery? You don’t mean that crackpot at the free clinic?’

  ‘That’s the guy. Here, lean on me.’


  Danyl snatched his arm from Steve’s grasp. ‘I need proper medical treatment, not that pothead. Besides, he won’t be open this early no matter what day it is.’

  ‘He’ll be there. He lives in the apartment behind the clinic,’ Steve said. ‘There’s a bell you can ring in an emergency.’

  ‘Well, this is an emergency,’ Danyl conceded. He considered his options.

  The hospital? He took Verity there once when she cut her finger cooking dinner. They waited in the foyer for twelve hours: Verity read celebrity gossip magazines and Danyl seethed and paced and ranted at the receptionist while a seemingly endless procession of car-crash victims and elderly heart patients jumped the queue ahead of them. Steve was right. The hospital was no good.

  But the local doctor? He told his patients to call him ‘Doctor K’. Danyl went to him a while back worried about a discoloured mole on his hip. Doctor K smelled conspicuously of marijuana and giggled when Danyl undressed for his examination.

  He leaned forward on the bench, doubled over in agony. His ankle was swelling: the skin felt stretched and tight. He clenched his teeth as a terrible warmth radiated up his leg. Thrombosis? Fragments of bone entering his bloodstream? He had an odd premonition that much weighed on his decision. One choice was right, the other wrong. But which was which?

  ‘Take me to the pothead,’ he decided.

  They linked arms and Danyl leaned on Steve, who carried the weight of his crippled, mutilated leg, and they staggered down Aro Street together in the pre-dawn gloom.

  ‘I went to a party at this doctor’s place once,’ Danyl said, as they neared the clinic. ‘Verity took me, back when we were first dating. Doctor K passed out after inhaling a huge volume of marijuana smoke from a bong carved in the shape of Ganesha.’

  ‘So the guy likes to party,’ said Steve. ‘So what?’

  ‘This was a barbecue. It was two in the afternoon. There were children there.’ It seemed to Danyl there was something important about that party—something he was supposed to remember, but the waves of pain racking his body carried the thought away. His entire foot felt as if it was dipped in molten lava. There was one consolation in all this, he told himself, gritting his teeth: if he was crippled indefinitely he wouldn’t have to carry that box all the way back to Verity’s house.