And the worst part was that he couldn’t blame Verity for anything. She must have given him the wrong street number, but he could never prove that, and she would deny it. He could hear her now: ‘Which is more likely, Danyl? That I got my own address wrong, or that you made a mistake?’
Horrible. So horrible that he decided the best approach was to ignore the entire situation. Problem solved. He put the notice on top of the box and closed the door to the room-between-rooms. He had more important things to attend to.
He made his way to the kitchen, his crutches thunking on the tile floor, and rummaged around in the medicine cabinet. This was a drawer filled with empty blister packs and jars of cough syrup encrusted with grime. He scavenged a decent fistful of pills from the detritus: a pretty, multicoloured mixture of painkillers, anti-inflammatories and some mysterious brown tablets that were probably just vitamins but you never knew your luck, and examined them with a practised eye. There were too many to take all at once, but too many was the precise dose he wanted, so he washed them all down with a glass of cold tea he found on the bench. That should take the sting out of things.
He headed for the stairs. The name from the missing-box notice kept nagging at him. S Parsons. S Parsons. He’d heard it before but couldn’t remember where. The newspaper? Something that happened in the valley before he arrived? That sounded right, and he was on the verge of recollection, then it was gone again.
He was almost at the foot of the stairs. The hallway pitched gently as he walked along it—an encouraging sign that he’d gotten his medication just right, or rather just wrong. The pain in his leg receded to a distant, irregular pulsation like a second heart beating in his left ankle.
The climb to the second floor was tricky because of the crutches and because his centre of gravity kept shifting and he had to cling onto the stairway banister because he was afraid of falling up into the ceiling, which loomed beneath him like a vast pit.
Actually, maybe too many pills had been too many. He reached the top of the stairs. The landing was a dimensionless region of dark planes and glowing windows. He sank to what seemed like the floor, curled into a foetal ball and slept.
‘Buddy?’
Danyl bleated sleepily.
‘Hey buddy. Wake up. We lucked out.’
Danyl opened his eyes. Steve stood above him. He held out a piece of paper. It was another copy of the missing box notice. ‘We hit the jackpot.’
The windows were dark. Danyl had slept the whole day away. His neck hurt and he was very hungry. He touched his cheek: the weave of the carpet was imprinted on the side of his face. He sat up and groped for his crutches. Steve saw them and said, ‘Oh yeah, how’s the foot?’
‘Agony.’
‘What did the healer at the Wellness Centre do?’
‘She didn’t do anything. She threw me out.’
‘That’s weird. Maybe it’s part of the cure?’
Danyl chose not to respond to this. They walked downstairs to the kitchen where he fixed himself a bowl of muesli with tapwater and crunched it joylessly.
Steve laid the notice on the table, smiling eagerly. ‘I already saw it,’ Danyl said. ‘We took the wrong box from the wrong house. Verity’s fault.’ The more he thought about it, the more this made sense. Verity would never live in such a horrible, ruined shack. What kind of person would?
‘Then it’s simple,’ Steve replied. ‘This S Parsons has misplaced their box. We’ve recovered it. We call them, they get their box back and we get rewarded for our efforts.’
‘Rewarded?’
‘Of course. How can there be an exchange between equals if there’s no exchange? Of course we’re rewarded. I didn’t invent capitalism,’ Steve explained. ‘Who are we to deny spontaneous order?’
‘What kind of reward did you have in mind?’
Steve shrugged. ‘Say, five thousand dollars?’
‘Five thousand? That’s like—’ Brief pause. ‘Two and a half thousand dollars each.’ Danyl scratched the stubble on his jaw. ‘But nobody who lives in a house like that will have that kind of money.’
‘Well that’s our starting position. We’ll bargain from there.’
‘I guess it’s worth a shot. I could really use several thousand dollars.’ Danyl picked up his phone and smoothed the notice out on the table. He asked, ‘Does the name S Parsons mean anything to you?’
‘Parsons? It sounds familiar. A genetic memory, perhaps?’
‘I’ll make the call.’
Danyl punched in the number. It rang. It took a long time to answer. Finally there was a click, silence, then a man’s voice, slow and dry. ‘Yes?’
‘Hi. Is this S Parsons?’
‘Yessss. Who am I sssspeaking to?’
Danyl hesitated. The voice on the phone sounded . . . evil. Something in the ancient, drawn-out cadence of those few words radiated malice down the line. He fought the urge to hang up. ‘My name is Steve,’ Danyl replied. Steve nodded encouragingly. ‘I’m calling about your box.’
‘Steve.’ The voice picked at his nerves. It hinted at scorpions in a dry chamber, bones bleached clean in the desert. ‘Steve. What do you know about my box, Steve?’
‘I know where it is. Roughly.’
‘Do you have it?’
‘It’s with this friend of mine, see, he—’
‘This friend of yours. I hope for his sake he hasn’t opened my box.’
Steve mouthed the word ‘reward’.
‘Er no,’ said Danyl. ‘But hey, the reason I’m calling is to find out what you have to offer.’
‘Offer?’
Steve gave the thumbs-up.
‘As a reward for returning your box. This has to be, um, an exchange between equals. Because of spontaneous order. Capitalism, if you follow me.’
An arid clicking noise came down the line. Danyl realised it was laughter. ‘Exchange between equals?’ More laughter. ‘You were foolish to call me, thief.’
‘Now there’s no need for acrimony,’ Danyl said. ‘I’m not a thief. All I’m saying is that your box and my efforts both have value—’
‘I have your scent now, thief. I’ll find my box. And I will find you. And then . . .’
Danyl could not speak. He could barely breathe. Steve gave him another thumbs-up.
‘I think I even know your real name,’ the voice continued. ‘I think you—’
Danyl hung up. His hands shook. He dropped the phone and looked at Steve with horror.
‘You didn’t bargain with him.’
‘He wasn’t the bargaining type.’ Danyl was numb with fear. What had he done? What manner of fiend was this S Parsons? Who had he just angered? And what had he gained? He picked up the notice, screwed it into a ball and said, ‘Let’s take another look inside that box.’
‘Well, that was an anticlimax.’
They knelt on the floor of the room-between-rooms. Danyl checked inside the box to see if they’d missed anything, but it was empty: the contents spread out from wall to wall.
‘It’s all connected.’
Danyl held up the object closest to him, the red brick, charred and blackened by fire, and said, ‘Connected? To what?’
Steve took the brick and put it back in its place. ‘You are so naïve. All these things fit together, somehow. They tell a story.’
Danyl’s imagination failed him. The box contained: a pile of old hardback books written in German, subjects unknown; a photo album filled with old photos; books about ancient Egypt, written in English (‘Written for tourists and amateurs,’ Steve sniffed); a biography of an Austrian adventurer, also in English; land information and council survey reports of houses in the Aro Valley; a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from the time of the First World War, mostly about Middle Eastern theatre deployments and combat deaths, with some domestic stories about the 1918 influenza epid
emic. And one brick.
‘It’s worthless,’ Danyl announced. ‘The story is that Parsons is a weird, scary guy who collects junk.’ He stood up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m calling him back. He can have his box for free. I don’t want it cluttering up my room-between-rooms.’
‘What about our reward?’
‘We can’t charge a fee for something that has no value.’ He walked back to the kitchen, picked up his phone from the table and pressed redial.
‘Wait!
‘What now?’ The phone was ringing. Steve hurried into the kitchen carrying the photo album. ‘Hang up now,’ he urged. ‘You have to see this.’
‘You’ve already showed me the weird pictures.’
‘This is something else. Something weirder.’
Danyl sighed and pressed the disconnect button on his phone. Steve laid the album flat on the table and they bent over it. ‘Take a close look.’
The page was open to a black-and-white photo of two men standing outside a two-storey wooden house.
‘What about it?’
‘Look closer.’
Danyl looked. The men wore old-fashioned, pre-war clothes. One was young and clean-shaven, the other older and impressively bearded with a hat casting a shadow over his face. They stood on a dirt road; the door to the house behind them was ajar, opening into a darkened hallway.
Danyl said, ‘I’m not seeing anything.’
‘Look.’ Steve pointed to the photo. ‘That road is the Old Devon Path. That track in the background is where Devon Street runs now.’ He pointed to the door. ‘And that there is the door to this kitchen. This is a photo of this house.’
‘Huh.’ Danyl looked at the photo again. He tipped his head, then turned and looked at his kitchen door, opening onto his back garden with the abandoned access road beyond it. ‘You’re right. That’s odd.’ He closed the photo album, handed it back to Steve and picked up his phone.
‘Odd?’
‘Yeah. Odd. Funny.’
Steve snatched the phone from his hand and stared at Danyl in disbelief. ‘Funny? Don’t you think we should discuss this?’ He opened the album and stabbed the photo with the finger. ‘Don’t you think it warrants further investigation?’
‘Why? It’s just a coincidence.’
‘How could it be a coincidence?’
‘I live in the Aro Valley,’ Danyl explained. ‘We found that box in the Aro Valley. Inside it are photos of houses in the Aro Valley. Coincidence.’
Steve shook his head, his expression unyielding. ‘There’s something going on here. This is no coincidence. We need to investigate. Go deeper.’
Danyl sat down, leaning his crutches against the table. He said, ‘Steve, let me explain a little something to you about reality and human existence. Our lives are made up of millions of discrete events, and our brains are wired to look for patterns and connections between them. So sometimes we see meaningful events even when they aren’t there. Example: you think about someone and later you find out that they died on that same exact day. Two random events related only by statistical probability—but instead we fabricate hidden, occult connections to link them. That’s all this picture is. A random connection.’
Danyl lay awake in the darkness.
Steve was gone. They had argued long into the night about coincidence and meaning and the significance of the photo and the contents of the box, and also whether the twentieth century really happened or, as Steve contended, was all a meticulous hoax, until Danyl finally relented and gave Steve a day to investigate the contents of the box before they returned it to the mysterious S Parsons.
He lay face-down on the bed. Had he done the right thing? He had been glad when Steve left, but now, alone, his leg in agony, vulnerable to attack from both S Parsons and the Campbell Walker, he wished he’d stayed. Even bickering with Steve was preferable to these hours of pain and apprehension and darkness.
He couldn’t sleep so he switched on his lamp, picked up his crutches and stood up. He was naked, and with the crutches he cut quite a figure in the dresser mirror. He amused himself with his reflection for a while before going downstairs to the room-between-rooms.
He started with the photo album. The pictures were dated by year and arranged in chronological order from 1913 to 1918. Danyl examined each one carefully.
He recognised a handful of locations around the Aro Valley: the entrance to Holloway Road; the view from the top of Epuni Street; his own house, obviously. But most of the pictures were interiors: group portraits, occult rituals; anonymous faces, anonymous rooms. Many of the people appeared in multiple photos, but there were no names or captions to identify them.
He put down the album and shifted his attention to the brick. It was chipped and heavy, red and scarred by fire. But even after several minutes of close inspection it refused to yield its secrets, so he returned it to the box and picked up the biography. It was about a nineteenth-century explorer called Wolfgang Bludkraft and was titled Rogue Traveller.
Wolfgang Bludkraft. Danyl had always disliked his own name and he felt, keenly, that if he’d had a name like Wolfgang Bludkraft his life would have been less like it was and more like, well, that of Wolfgang Bludkraft, explorer, mercenary, explorer, occultist, adventurer. Lover.
Bludkraft, Danyl read, having taken the book back to bed and propped himself up on his pillows, was born in 1850. He grew up in a middle-class family in Vienna and travelled to Cairo as an archaeological student. He worked on digs until his professors caught him selling relics on the black market and expelled him from the German Archaeological Institute.
So he went to Ivory Coast and fought with the French army in the Mandingo wars, thus beginning a long career as a mercenary for European colonial forces. He fought against the Hottentots in German South-West Africa, and then returned to the north of the continent, where he set up a business trading guns. He settled in Harar in eastern Ethiopia, befriended Rimbaud and Ras Makkonen, and established a harem of Nubian mistresses, a detail that distracted Danyl for several minutes.
When he took up the book again, Bludkraft returned to Cairo, where he funded and led archaeological expeditions to the Saqqara necropolis north-west of Memphis. He travelled around Egypt and Libya for several years, making numerous discoveries and publishing his findings in the Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde, a prestigious journal of Egyptology whose title Danyl amused himself by reading out loud each time it was mentioned.
Then war broke out in the Sudan. Bludkraft served as an ‘advisor’ under Kitchener in the campaign against the Dervishes; he met Churchill who mentioned him in The River War. Danyl was now halfway through the book and Bludkraft was still younger than him, which forced Danyl to confront the fact that he was not, perhaps, living his life to the full. He didn’t want to fight desert campaigns in the Sudan and make necklaces of his enemies’ ears, especially, but surely there must be some happy medium between that and his own colourless existence.
He took a break from reading and looked at the illustration plates in the middle of the book. They showed Bludkraft as a young man in Vienna; blurred images of African colonial outposts; Bludkraft the young soldier posing with comrades, guides and captive prisoners; older Bludkraft in a studio photo looking dignified with a pipe and cravat.
Danyl looked at this last picture for a long time. Then he got up and hobbled downstairs again, returning with the photo album. He laid the picture of the two men standing outside his house next to the studio portrait of the aged Bludkraft.
There was no doubt. None at all. Wolfgang Bludkraft was the older of the two men photographed outside Danyl’s home in 1914. Danyl smiled indulgently, imagining Steve’s reaction to this news and the wild theories he’d fabricate to explain it. It would be kinder, almost, not to tell him.
He took up the book again, a little curious h
imself to learn how and why Bludkraft travelled from the trackless wastes of the Nubian Desert and the Governor’s Palace in Khartoum to the quiet, leafy streets of Te Aro.
After the British victory at Omdurman, Bludkraft returned to Egypt. More archaeological expeditions followed, again around Saqqara, but this time they were conducted in great secrecy and no scholarly papers followed. Then he took ill—the nature of the sickness a mystery—and after convalescing in Mersa Matruh he sailed home to Vienna in early 1900 and never, according to the biographer, set foot in Africa again.
Bludkraft returned to Austria a wealthy man. He bought a house off the Ringstrasse, became a respected member of society and . . . Danyl flipped through chapters dealing with marriage, children, failed attempts to buy his way into the nobility, marriage failure, business failure and bankruptcy, and stopped when he saw the word occult.
Bludkraft became a key figure in the German occult revival of the late nineteenth century. He joined the Theosophists, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and the von Liste Society, and rose quickly through their ranks.
The wheel of fortune turned again. Bludkraft established a foundation for the scientific study of spiritual phenomena. Donations rolled in. He joined the Leopoldina and became a fellow of the Royal Society; he published scholarly essays on Islam and religion in pre-dynastic Egypt and, later, less technical articles on hidden Pharaonic societies which he claimed were still extant across North Africa: timeless cults through which the wisdom of the ancients was preserved and into which, Bludkraft hinted, he himself was initiated.
His foundation flourished. He proposed to build a temple to spirituality in Vienna. Not just a temple, Bludkraft announced, but a cathedral, one to rival the great Christian houses of worship—an occult Chartres.
Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley Page 6