Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  ‘We’re here,’ said Steve.

  The clinic was set back from the main road at the end of a driveway between two townhouses. As they neared the entrance Danyl noticed that the mounted plaque advertising the doctor’s name and opening hours was gone, replaced by a blue plastic billboard with ‘EZWHUC’ written on it in futuristic white letters.

  ‘EZWHUC? What the hell is EZWHUC?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Steve looked puzzled. He guided them down the driveway. They reached a car park behind the apartment buildings and approached the wooden wheelchair ramp leading to the entrance.

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Steve. ‘The front door is open. And the light’s on. You lucked out, buddy. He’s open for business.’

  ‘Don’t tell me I lucked out. And why would he be open at this hour of . . .’ He looked up and his voice trailed away. The clinic was a single-storey brick building, previously unremarkable but now decorated with an elaborate mural covering the front wall: a procession of children and woodland animals danced amid mystical symbols including an ankh, om symbol, taijitu, swastika, wyrm oroborous and Star of David. The word ‘Namaste’ was rainbowed over the entrance. Beneath this, ‘Wellcome to The EZ Wellness Heal U Centre’ was stencilled into the glass window above the doorway.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Danyl. ‘No no no.‘ He remembered now. The party he went to was a farewell party. Doctor K had sold his clinic and moved to Bhutan. Now it was an alternative healing centre. He declared, ‘I’m not going in there.’

  ‘Why not? The clinic’s open. You’ll see the doctor in no time.’

  ‘There’s no doctor in there. That’s not a clinic. It’s an abomination.’

  ‘Don’t be so reactionary. Look at the sign—it’s a Wellness Centre. They’ll take a spiritual approach. This is better than a doctor. That depression we talked about yesterday—’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Gone! Let’s see one of your western medical doctors do that. They’re just shills for the Enlightenment.’

  ‘I like the Enlightenment. I like living after it. Let me go!’

  Steve said, ‘You’re going in.’

  A brief tussle broke out: Danyl tried to back away from the Wellness Centre while Steve, still holding him up, dragged him towards the ramp. Steve triumphed.

  ‘Let’s just see what happens.’ he spoke soothingly, while Danyl trembled in his arms like a furious rabbit. ‘Go in, try it and if you want to leave we’ll call you an ambulance.’

  That sounded reasonable. It was hard to think through the pain, so Danyl stopped struggling and let himself be led up the ramp, through the open door and into the EZ Wellness Heal U Centre.

  The reception area was modern and brightly lit, and almost unchanged from the days of Doctor K’s medical practice. Almost. The women’s magazines were gone: a stack of alternative-health pamphlets (‘How to purge your skeletal system’) lay stacked on the coffee table, and the tea and coffee machine had been replaced with a water filter filled with—according to the label—celestial water. The receptionist’s desk, once buried under stacks of patient records, stood bare: not even a computer or phone, not even a chair.

  ‘Really great toilets here.’ Steve sat down beside him. ‘You should check them out. ’

  Danyl hissed, ‘Where are these people? Do they even know we’ve arrived?’

  ‘Oh they know we’re here.’ Steve pointed at a video camera mounted in the ceiling above the receptionist’s desk, aimed directly at their couch. ‘Now we wait.’

  Danyl sipped his celestial water and flipped through the pamphlets. Eventually a door opened in the far wall and a woman entered the room. She had short black hair and wore an odd, pyjama-like outfit fashioned from red silk. Her pale green eyes caught and held the light. She drifted across the room, moving with exquisite, alien grace. Despite his misgivings Danyl was immediately impressed with her air of serene calm, her dazzling smile and her charmingly large breasts. As she approached she said, ‘Please. I am Stasia. Sorry to keep you wait.’

  Steve stood. He bowed his head and said, ‘Namaste, Stasia. My friend is in need of your skills. He’s very sick. Also he fell and hurt his leg.’

  Danyl grinned through the pain. ‘Hello, Stasia. It’s my ankle. I think it’s broken. Are you allowed to prescribe drugs?’

  ‘No drugs.’ Her eyes were like luminous fish coiling in a dark aquarium. They flicked over his body. Danyl felt exposed in his flimsy gym shorts, and he silently cursed the pale flabbiness of his legs.

  ‘I hurt myself running. Marathon training.’

  Steve added, ‘He slipped in the gutter. He was running from a moth.’

  Stasia knelt beside him, cradled his foot and rotated the ankle in its socket. ‘Flex toes back. Now forward. Side to side. Does this hurt?’

  Danyl breathed in sharply. ‘A little. A lot, actually.’

  She pinched and twisted the ligament just below his ankle bone. ‘And this?’

  ‘More. So much more.’

  ‘Is minor sprain.’ Stasia squeezed the tissue. ‘Torn anterior talofibular ligament.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘Is easy to fix. I treat you.’ She turned to Steve. ‘You go.’

  ‘How will he get home?’

  ‘That is no longer your concern. Go. Now.’

  Stasia escorted Steve to the door, where he turned and gave Danyl a reassuring smile and a thumbs-up, which Danyl did not reciprocate. He was happy to be left alone with a woman as attractive as Stasia, but he was also sick with pain and desperate to receive proper medical attention, which he did not believe she was qualified to administer.

  So he sat, silent and apprehensive as she closed the entrance door behind Steve, locking it shut with an audible click. Then she produced a wheelchair from a closet by the reception desk, helped him into it—she carried his weight effortlessly—and then wheeled him through the door in the far wall, and down a long hall to a door marked ‘Wellness Chamber’.

  ‘We start with questions. So.’

  Danyl lay on his back on an elevated bed in the centre of the Wellness Chamber, which was the doctor’s old office, but instead of pharmaceutical reference books and plastic models of the female reproductive system, the shelves were filled with smooth, oddly coloured stones, notebooks with hand-drawn geometric patterns on the covers and jars filled with murky fluids and ash. The windows, he remembered, used to look out over the back garden. Now they were covered with thick blackout curtains. The room was lit by candles.

  Stasia stood behind him, out of his line of vision. Her red silk outfit rustled as she moved. Danyl swallowed. Even through the terrible pain the thought of her lush, inviting body filled him with hunger. He squeezed his thighs together and started when she spoke.

  ‘Do you live alone?’

  ‘N— Yes.’

  ‘Your address, please.’

  He gave it; the scratching of her pen filled the room.

  ‘Is old house?’

  ‘Um. Yes.’

  ‘Have you ever drowned?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Then, without making a sound, she appeared beside the bed. Danyl drew in a sharp breath. The sight of her breasts looming overhead prompted a physical reaction which, if allowed to continue, his thin polyester running shorts could not conceal. He closed his eyes.

  Stasia said, ‘Now I heal you. But first I warn you.’

  ‘Warn me?’

  ‘I give to you my gift.’ Her voice was soft, more vibration than sound. Her long, delicate fingers grazed his lower leg. ‘This is the gift of healing. This gift can bring great peril and terrible pain, but once I begin I cannot stop.’

  ‘What is it that you do, exactly?’

  ‘Yes. You have the questions. I answer. I tell you story about my gift, how I came to possess it, and of the terrible suffering my gift of healing can bring. Then I heal you. Maybe.’
/>   Danyl lay on the bed with his eyes squeezed shut, as Stasia traced patterns on his calves with the tips of her fingers and talked.

  ‘I grow up in small village in old country. It is called Povrovskoye, deep in Tobolsk province of Siberia. Do you know it?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘I am raised there by my grandmother, and we live together in a caravan in clearing in woods near village. We are very poor but very happy. One summer’s day when I am nine years old I walk to village to buy flour and when I reach the road I find a dog with gold fur lying in grass. She has been hit by truck, and she lies in a pool of her blood, whimpering. One of her eyes hangs loose from its socket and her mouth foams red. I run back to the caravan in the clearing, crying, and fetch my grandmother and she follows me back to the road.

  ‘My grandmother is very calm. She looks and listens and waits to make sure there is no one about. Then she kneels down in the bloody dust and closes her eyes, and her lips move. She lays her hands upon the dying beast: it whimpers and pants and its remaining eye is white with fear. She presses her hands against the animal, touching its head, its chest, its wounded leg. Then, very soon, dog’s breathing calms and it sleeps, and we carry it back to our home. She lies by the fire outside our caravan for three days and my grandmother tends to her, and by end of third day dog can walk again, although her eye never heals so she is half blind.

  ‘I am filled with questions about this. I ask my grandmother, how did she heal animal? Where did she learn do this? I follow with more questions that have weighed upon me my whole life. Where is rest of our family? Why are my grandmother and I alone? Why do we live in this caravan in woods?

  ‘My grandmother is silent. But I persist, and in the end she make pact with me. She will teach me the gift of her healing, and in return I will ask no more questions about my family.

  ‘I agree. I am twelve-year-old girl. What is knowing about my past compared with this gift? So my grandmother reveals to me this secret art of healing. But she warns me, “The gift can bring great misery. Be careful who you heal. Use gift only on animal, or those you know to be worthy. Never use it without asking my advice.”

  ‘Of course I do not listen. That winter, a teacher in the village falls ill. She has terrible ache in head and even small daylight of winter sun is blinding to her. She does not sleep. She does not eat and is starving to death. All children in village are consume by grief. So one day when my grandmother is busy I steal out from our caravan. Sun is grey blur on horizon. I go to house of teacher and enter room where she lies alone, on deathbed. She looks at me without fear or hope, then I lay my hands upon her and give to her the gift, and she screams with pain.

  ‘She is very sick. To heal her is difficult and brings her great suffering. But I persist, and late that night disease is gone and she sleeps, and I return home across fields of snow beneath starless sky.

  ‘The next day the teacher comes to me and we speak in clearing outside my caravan. She is crying tears of happiness and she thanks me over and over again. I feel great joy. My grandmother hears everything but says nothing.

  ‘The next day teacher comes to me again. She is still crying, and the tears will not stop. Her face is wet and her eyes are red and sore. She begs me to do something to stop the tears, and I lay my hands upon her eyelids and try to heal her with the gift, but nothing happens. I ask my grandmother to help but she refuses, and says only, “The gift has will of its own.” The teacher stumbles away into the woods, wailing and clawing at her tear-stained cheeks.

  ‘The next day she comes again. Still she cries. She is half-mad; she pleads with me to help her. She promises me money. She threatens me. But I am just small girl, I run away in fear. On the fourth day she does not come, and I walk into village. A small crowd has gathered around swimming hole in stream, where teacher was found drowned early that morning.

  ‘I was torn apart with grief. I swore to myself never to use the gift again. But my story does not end there. For a new teacher arrived in the village, and he discovered that the government had sent money to the school to build a well so the children could have clean drinking water. But, he revealed, previous teacher had kept monies to herself. When I heard this I thought about the tears flowing from the teacher’s eyes, and her body floating in dark water of stream, and I understood the true nature of my grandmother’s gift.’

  Stasia was silent for a minute, then she spoke in a stern tone. ‘Open your eyes. Look at me.’

  Danyl obeyed. She cupped his jaw with her fingers and lifted his head off the bed. She stared at him with terrible intensity. ‘This then is my promise to you. If your body has wounds it will heal them, but if your spirit has wounds it will tear them open. If you feel ready for gift then I will give to you and make whole your sprained anterior talofibular ligament. But few are prepared. Is better, I think, for you to wait. Heal your spirit; make peace with your enemies. Then I will come to your home and heal your flesh.’ She held Danyl’s head; her face filled his vision. He felt like a helpless young whale trapped in the tentacled clutches of a sexy, giant-breasted giant squid; paralysed by its terrible, knowing eyes.

  Stasia said, ‘Now you are understanding everything. What is your reply?’

  Danyl considered. He wasn’t a bad guy. He hadn’t done anything terrible, like steal money from a school. But what criteria did the gift use to judge people? What if he’d done some innocuous thing in the past, like accidentally spill bleach on Verity’s fancy silk kimono and then hide the ruined garment in a box under the stairs and deny all knowledge of its existence? What if the gift punished him for that, even though it was just an accident?

  Then he rebuked himself. Fool! There was no gift. Stasia didn’t have any mystical healing powers—she was just a superstitious sex-kitten peasant girl from some ignorant backwater village. Either that or an unscrupulous con-artist.

  He looked up at her. Her eyes shone with wisdom, her breasts heaved like Zeppelins mating under a red silk tarpaulin. He said, ‘How much are you charging me for this gift?’

  ‘No charge.’

  ‘No charge? How do you make money?’ He gestured at the Wellness Chamber. ‘How can you afford to pay for all this?’

  She smiled. ‘That is my concern. It is a sin for me to sell my gift. But is it a sin to receive it? That is your concern.’

  No charge. So she was just plain crazy. He should leave—get her to call him an ambulance and get him to hospital. But his curiosity was piqued. Also, he desperately wanted Stasia to touch him. So he said, as sincerely as he could, ‘It is not a sin. Heal me.’

  Her eyes glittered. Her expression did not change. ‘You will take gift? You feel you have lived good life?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Is commendable. Maybe.’ She laid her palms on his ankle. Her touch was warm, almost uncomfortably so. ‘I warn you there may be great pain but once start very dangerous stop. Yes?’

  Danyl shrugged his shoulders. ‘OK.’

  ‘So we begin.’

  4

  The gate

  She took a deep breath and Danyl’s penis stirred again. He closed his eyes. Her fingers tensed.

  There was a knock on the door.

  Stasia removed her hands. Danyl said, ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Is nothing. Do not move.’

  She crossed the room and opened the door. Danyl heard an exchange of whispers, a man’s voice. Stasia called back over her shoulder, ‘One moment. You please excuse,’ and stepped into the hall, closing the door behind her.

  Danyl waited. He stared at the ceiling. He waited some more.

  This was absurd. What was he doing here? He was in agony—his body was a hydraulic system pumping blood into his maimed leg and receiving pain in return. He should be in hospital under heavy sedation, not lying on a bed in some Wellness Chamber while a sex-doll spiritual healer kept him waiting.

  The voices in the
hall grew louder. Whispers no longer, they were raised voices, then shouts. Danyl drummed his fingers on the edge of the bed and hummed to himself, trying to drown them out. He thought about the future. His ankle was broken or badly sprained—he would be incapacitated for weeks, confined to the house. He sighed. Wouldn’t it be nice, he reflected, if the girl in the hall really had mystical powers, if she could just heal him and send him home, and then—why not?—fall in love with him and initiate him into strange and forbidden erotic mysteries. Why couldn’t life meet him halfway on these things? Was it really too much to ask?

  The voices through the door were whispers again. This was ridiculous. Danyl swung his legs over the bed and sat up. The wheelchair was parked on the other side of the room. To reach it he would have to support himself on her shelves and desk.

  Her desk.

  He blinked, remembering. Her desk was Doctor K’s old desk and Danyl recalled now how K’s garden party had ended. After the doctor passed out and his girlfriend dragged him to bed, Verity picked up his bag of pot and led Danyl through the doctor’s apartment to this very office, and hid the bag of shrivelled green leaves in a concealed drawer in the bottom of this same desk. ‘It’s the drugs cabinet,’ she said, tucking the pot away behind rows of vials and blister packs. ‘He never locks it.’

  Danyl’s eyes lingered on the drawer. What if Stasia also kept a hidden stash of drugs in the same location? Or, better yet, what if K, in his perpetual state of pothead confusion left a king’s ransom of painkillers behind when he left for Bhutan, and Danyl could spend the next month on an epic narcotics binge and regain consciousness with his ankle fully healed. Perhaps the EZ Wellness Heal U Clinic would fulfil him spiritually after all.

  More angry whispering from the hallway. Danyl measured the distance to the desk and licked his lips. Should he risk it? Why not? What did he have to lose?