His gurgling continued, rising in pitch. What happened here? Danyl tried to think. He remembered Stasia. The secret pact. Then a kiss. Heat. Pain, then nipples; light. Then darkness. And now this. It made no sense.
There was a thin platform of floor remaining: it was about a foot wide, running around the side of the room. Danyl followed it; coughing and waving away the swirling clouds of plaster. The windows were open. He crossed over to them, balancing carefully on the floor beams, and looked out. All the furniture from the room lay in a broken pile in his backyard.
He was still making the gurgling noise, he realised. So he stopped. He slapped his forehead, trying to shake himself out of his state of dazed stupor. But the confusion remained. He turned away from the window.
The door to the landing creaked in the breeze and then swung shut, revealing the full-length mirror attached to the back. Danyl stood reflected in it: the angle and lack of floor made him look as though he floated in mid-air. He observed this illusion for several seconds before realising that he was standing without his crutches, which lay on the floor beside his bed on the other side of the house, and that he was balancing on a narrow beam, his weight on both his feet, without the slightest sensation of pain in his ankle.
Stasia had healed him.
10
Good news, bad news and mysterious news
‘It’s incredibly obvious,’ said Steve.
‘Obvious? Really?’
‘It’s the power of positive thinking. Stasia describes herself as a healer, and if we believe someone can heal us then they can.’
‘But I didn’t believe she could heal me.’
‘Oh Danyl, it doesn’t matter what you personally believe.’ They sat at the kitchen table. As Steve spoke he gestured out the open door indicating the lit windows of the Aro Valley. ‘You live in a community that believes in faith healing, so you’re subject to that belief. That’s why your ankle is healed.’
Danyl rolled his eyes at this patent nonsense. ‘But you can’t just cure a sprained ankle. You can’t magic the ligaments back together—it takes weeks for the tissue to repair itself. It’s impossible.’
‘Impossible,’ Steve replied. ‘Yet there you are. Healed. Perfect.’
‘I’m not healed, idiot. My ankle is still sprained. I just can’t feel the pain yet because Stasia drugged me.’
‘Drugged you? What makes you say that? You don’t seem sedated. Quite the opposite.’
‘Look around us,’ Danyl replied.
They sat in the kitchen amid the ruined debris from the spare bedroom, which was visible directly above them. The light bulb—no longer suspended from the ceiling, because there was no ceiling—sat on top of the fridge, propped in place by bottles of olive oil and tomato sauce, which cast sinister shadows over the tableau of destruction.
‘She ripped my house apart. Could I have slept through this if I wasn’t drugged? This was her plan all along.’ He picked up a handful of dust and let it run through his fingers. ‘She got me out of the way and then destroyed my spare room. The perfect crime.’
‘Your hypothesis doesn’t match the data,’ Steve said sternly. ‘I don’t think Stasia had anything to do with this.’
‘She drugged me and when I woke up I found this. If she didn’t do it, who did? The Illuminati? The Royal Society?’ The Royal Society were always the focus of Steve’s conspiracy theories. All of western history, he argued, had been faked by the Royal Society.
‘So quick to scoff. Tell me, how long were you unconscious?’
Danyl checked the time on his phone. He said, ‘About two hours.’
‘And how long would it take to do that?’ He pointed at the ravaged skeleton of Danyl’s spare bedroom.
‘Not long. She obviously had tools: a power saw; a crowbar. Some kind of mallet. Maybe an hour.’
‘So.’ Steve affected his wise, patient professorial manner. ‘You slept between eight and ten, and during this time you claim Stasia destroyed your room. But I was engaged in some secret research this evening, and returning home at 8.30 I saw Stasia walking along Aro Street.’
‘What? Where?’
‘Just outside the video store. She was headed towards her Wellness Centre. She appeared calm. She had no dust in her hair, or on her clothes. She carried no tools. What do you say to that?’
‘You’re sure it was her?’
‘Red silk outfit? Green eyes? Unbelievable body?’
‘That’s her. But she must have been involved somehow—as an accomplice, perhaps. She was here just before it happened. That can’t be coincidence.’
‘Remember what you told me yesterday,’ Steve cautioned. ‘Coincidence is everywhere. Our minds are designed to find links that don’t exist. Speaking of which.’ He took a crumpled ball of papers from his jacket pocket and smoothed them out on the table. ‘While you’ve been distracted, I’ve been researching our good friends Sutcliffe Parsons and Wolfgang Bludkraft.’
‘Who cares about that? My spare room is gone.’
‘Oh, that damage is all just structural.’ Steve waved his hand dismissively and stabbed his papers with his index finger. ‘This is important.’
Danyl gave the mess in his kitchen a final, despairing look—it would take hours to clean it all up—and leaned forward to inspect Steve’s findings.
‘I went down to the national archives,’ Steve said. ‘They have all the old Customs disembarkation records digitised and indexed for searching. They’re mainly used by people researching their family histories although it’s also a useful tool for humble psychologists like myself. Wolfgang Bludkraft’s Customs records are very illuminating.’
‘How so?’
Steve passed him one of the papers. It showed an image of a ledger sheet covered with tiny handwriting, and he pointed to an entry near the bottom of the page. ‘Bludkraft’s arrival information. He entered the country on a steamer ship on 30 April 1914.’
Danyl said, ‘Three months after the police in Vienna pronounced him dead. What else did you find?’
‘Ah.’ Steve smiled knowingly. ‘But that’s what so interesting.’ He sat back in his chair, beaming.
‘What? What?’
‘I didn’t find anything.’
‘And that’s interesting because—?’
‘I checked the disembarkation logs for the subsequent six months. There are no other entries for Bludkraft on file.’
‘Maybe he stayed longer?’
‘Indeed he did. Because in July of 1914 every country in the British Commonwealth—including this one—declared war on Germany and Austria. All civilians from those countries were considered enemy aliens. The police rounded them up and imprisoned them in internment camps on offshore islands. I checked the confinement lists. Wolfgang Bludkraft was never captured. When war broke out he simply vanished. One year later his name is on a list of fugitives.’
‘Huh.’ Danyl considered this. ‘Actually, that is pretty interesting.’
‘Yes. So let’s take another look at that photo album. Are the pictures of Bludkraft taken in the Aro Valley dated before or after he became a known fugitive?’ Steve stood, looking very pleased with himself, and patted his pockets. ‘I assume you’ve checked on the box and its contents, and it’s all still safe in the room-between-rooms?’
‘Parsons,’ Danyl spat. ‘It has to be Parsons.’ He punched the wall, hurting his hand.
The room-between-rooms was empty. The box was gone.
‘The album was in the box,’ Danyl said. ‘Everything was in there.’
Steve leaned in the doorway. ‘Then we know where to find it. Parsons must live in that house at the top of Holloway Road where we accidentally stole the box.’ He grinned in the darkness. ‘If we want it back, we just go take it.’
Danyl considered this. He thought about the sinister voice on the phone, the decaying house,
the figure watching him from the window. Was it moral to rob a known Satanist? Was it safe? He shook his head. ‘It’s too risky. We’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. Did you find out anything else?’
‘Not much. I had an honours student print out archived news stories about Sutcliffe Parsons. I haven’t read them yet. They’re on your dining table.’
Danyl sighed. He looked around the empty room-between-rooms, hoping to glimpse a clue, some stray piece of evidence. But there was nothing. He said, ‘Let’s go take a look.’ He picked up his crutches, which leaned against the wall by the door and held onto the grips. Steve watched this, silently, and continued to block the doorway.
‘Shall we go?’
‘Let’s clear up this whole crutch thing first. Why are you using those?’
Danyl explained, as if to a child, ‘My ankle is sprained.’
‘The one you were standing on ten seconds ago without any discomfort? That ankle?’
‘I told you, I’ve been drugged. I can’t feel the pain.’
‘If you pinch yourself, does it hurt?’
Danyl experimented. ‘Yes.’
‘So this hypothetical drug masks the pain in your ankle, but only that pain?’
‘Apparently.’
‘But don’t you see how absurd that sounds? Why can’t you accept that Stasia healed you? Isn’t that a more likely explanation than some mysterious drug?’
‘No,’ said Danyl firmly. ‘A miracle cure is by definition the least likely explanation. Miracles are impossible so anything else, no matter how unlikely, is more likely.’
‘Logic? Is that all you’ve got?’
‘Get out of my room-between-rooms.’
Steve gave the crutches a this-isn’t-finished look and led him back down the hall to the kitchen. Danyl eased himself into a chair while Steve shuffled through his papers, from which he produced a clutch of photocopied news stories. The first article ran alongside a photograph of a man being led into a courtroom by police officers. He wore a shirt and tie; his face was covered by his suit jacket. The headline read: ‘Local teacher in Satan Sex Shock’.
‘I never met Sutcliffe Parsons,’ Steve said, ‘but I remember the case. It was a show-trial. Parsons was railroaded because he was an outsider, and society,’ Steve added scare quotes to the word with his fingers, ‘didn’t want him teaching the kids the truth. So they branded him a Satanist and locked him away.’
‘It says here that he was a self-described black magician who eventually pleaded guilty to charges of indecent assault on a minor.’
Steve sneered. ‘And do you just believe anything the corporate mainstream media tells you?’
Danyl checked the byline. ‘This story ran in the Aro Valley Community Volunteers Newsletter.’
‘Exactly. Whose tune do they dance to?’
Danyl chose not to reply. He flipped through the rest of the clippings. There was nothing of any interest: all the details of the case were suppressed. Danyl felt a rising sense of indifference. Did any of this matter? Parsons seemed like a horrible guy, and Danyl inadvertently stole his box. Parsons took it back and destroyed Danyl’s spare room, presumably out of vengeance, possibly because that’s just how black magicians did things. And maybe Stasia was involved, somehow, and maybe she wasn’t. ‘Seems like we’ve reached a dead end,’ he said. ‘Without the clues in the box we have nothing to go on.’
‘Not if we storm Parsons’ house. Ransack it for clues. Take back the box—’
‘Forget it.’ Danyl rolled up the news clippings and handed them back to Steve. ‘I’m a writer, not a criminal.’
Danyl sat on his toilet, plotting his next move.
He’d spent most of the night cleaning the dust and rubbish from his kitchen—Steve fled the scene the second Danyl picked up a broom. His next job was to do something about the pile of broken furniture in his backyard, tossed there from his spare room window by person or persons unknown. He should move it before the drug wore off and his ankle re-sprained.
Then, he decided, he’d get a few hours’ sleep. When the sun came up he would hunt Stasia down and confront her: demand the truth about what happened, then—contingent on her answers—ask her to have dinner with him. Also, he really needed more fruit in his diet.
He stood up and slammed the toilet lid shut in disgust, defeated by it. Then he remembered: didn’t he buy some fibre supplements just that morning? So much had happened—peace with Campbell, kissing Stasia, then being drugged, healed and robbed—that he’d forgotten about his shopping trip.
He roamed the empty house searching for his bag and eventually found it under his bed. He must have knocked it there accidentally when he fell over earlier. He unzipped it and rummaged around inside, fumbling for the fibre supplements, when his hand closed around the cover of a hardback book.
Bludkraft’s biography.
Of course! He thought it was gone, along with everything else in the box; instead he’d put it in his backpack and forgotten about it. Finally a stroke of luck! Danyl! Although . . . He frowned. He thought he’d put the photo album in the bag too, but it wasn’t there. He must have left it in the box.
He switched on his bedside lamp and flipped through the Bludkraft biography, stopping when he reached the back. Here was something he had previously overlooked. Taped to the inside of the back cover was a thin plastic envelope containing a black and white photograph, its edges yellowed with age. He held the book under the lamp and inspected it.
An old man and a young woman stood side-by-side in the back garden of Danyl’s house. Behind them was some sort of construction: shovels and spades leaned against a cement mixer beside a trench running the length of the yard. Danyl peered at the girl: she had long black hair and sad, sunken eyes. He recognised her from the photos in the album.
The old man was Wolfgang Bludkraft. Who was the girl? Bludkraft’s lover?
On the bottom of the envelope someone had written in tiny, neat marker pen: ‘AG to JC. Second letter.’
Letter? Danyl opened the plastic envelope, took out the photo and turned it over. There were words on the back of the photo, written in faint blue ink.
12 February, 1916
Dear Jack,
I hope you’ll agree this is a better picture. I hope you are well. It is late at night and this is the only time I have to myself. Our treasure is with us. As I write it keeps safely, underground, in the place prepared for it. We were prisoners who could not see our prison, now we are free. I can say no more—you will understand when you return.
At dawn the Order meets at the well and proceeds to the temple. I think of you always. Stay safe.
All my love,
Anna
The word ‘treasure’ leaped off the page. What treasure? Where? Who were Jack and Anna? Was Anna the women in the picture? If so, then the date proved that Bludkraft lived in the Aro Valley while he was a fugitive from the government.
And who were the Order? Where was the well? What was the temple? Danyl shuddered with excitement. These were solid leads: riddles to answer; mysteries to solve. He smiled, imagining the wild theories Steve would fabricate to explain them. His earlier despair turned to joy, and he felt a rumbling in his gut and a sudden sense of great forces shifting and opening deep within him. He ran back to the toilet, smiling eagerly, still clutching the photograph.
11
Irony
‘What are you doing?’
That was Verity’s voice. Danyl stopped kicking. He turned and looked, and sure enough there she was standing at his gate, holding a suitcase, a look of revulsion on her pretty face.
Danyl lay on his back, jammed between his front door and a couch, which was wedged halfway through the doorway. Verity’s gaze was directed at his mid-section which, he now realised, consisted of his dressing gown hiked up around his waist and no underwear, his legs flailing wildly as h
e struggled to force the couch through the door. This pose left him very exposed to visitors, or casual passers-by, or even anyone driving along Devon Street unfortunate enough to glance his way. He wriggled forwards and smoothed the flaps of his gown around his knees, and nodded engagingly at Verity, who did not smile back.
An hour earlier he had emerged from the toilet, humming cheerfully, his mind awhirl with thoughts of the letter on the back of the photo, the underground treasure, the Order, the temple. He brewed a mug of tea and walked out to his yard to inspect the mound of broken furniture piled just outside his back door, directly beneath his spare-room window, tossed there by fiends unknown. Most of the items were destroyed beyond repair. No problem. He’d just drag them deep into the yard and let the weeds claim them. But Verity’s couch was undamaged.
Verity’s stupid, horrible couch—the one with the silk cover covered with vaginal eyes—sat atop the pile. Just looking at it now made Danyl uncomfortable. Why did it, of all things, survive the fall?
The couch was the work of a local artist. The artist was dead, and the couch was now valuable. Verity would probably kick up a fuss if he left it in the garden to rot. So he carried the other items—including the single bed, which had been chopped into fragments to fit through the window—into the recesses of the garden and abandoned them in a hollow beneath the trees. Then he rolled the couch upright and wiped off some of the mud and grass stains.
It was too large to fit through the hall, so he dragged it around to the front of the house, stood it up on one side and lowered it through the front door. It caught on the handle, tearing a hole in the fabric, and jammed against the frame. So Danyl knelt down and wedged himself into the diagonal gap between couch and door, his flesh crawling beneath the dozens of vaginal compound eyes staring at him. Now he was up close to the couch he could see there was a faint background drawn onto the print. The eyes were looking through a gap in a ruined building. Reflected in the iris of the larger vaginas were the vague outlines of two figures embracing. And there were tiny words written in Cyrillic characters stitched about the lips of each vagina.
Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley Page 10