Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  Danyl nodded. ‘I know how it is.’

  ‘So stranger does strange thing. He holds his hand on wounds of my grandmother’s leg. And then she screams louder because the touch of the foreigner brings great pain. When she can take pain no more she faints, and her last thought it that she will never wake.

  ‘But she does. It is dark and she is alone in forest. She is very frightened and runs back through the trees towards the distant, flickering light of her parent’s home. So great is her fear that she does not realise her deadly wound is healed until she is safe in arms of parents, and they ask why she has blood on clothes, yet she has no injury, only pink scar on calf.

  ‘She cannot answer, so they go to room of foreigner. Inside room he tells them he has gift of healing. He gave gift to little girl and healed her leg. But, he warns them, gift is dangerous. It can bring terrible things. It can destroy houses and ruin lives. So he begs them not to tell anyone of this gift.

  ‘They agree to this. Months pass. The foreigner spends much time alone in his room. Always, late at night they hear him talking, whispering. Then winter comes, and grandmother’s family hear bad news. Farmer who owns their land is sick. He has the pneumonia, with fever and bloody sputum like jelly of red currents.

  ‘They are very sad. If farmer dies then land around village go to his relatives living in nearby city, and they will make life very hard for people of our village. So my grandmother’s parents ask the foreigner, please heal the farmer.

  ‘Foreigner refuse. He say dreadful things will happen if he uses his gift. But they beg him. Have they not taken him into their home? Fed him food from their garden? Kept him safe from whatever it is he hides from? So that day at noon, when sun is grey blur on horizon, they go to house of farmer. Foreigner enters room where farmer lie on deathbed, tended to by doctor. He closes door. They hear farmer cry out in pain. Then silence, one hour; two, then foreigner and doctor emerge from room together. Doctor is pale, shaken. He tells family that the farmer will live, that he is in deep sleep, but sickness is gone.

  ‘There is great relief, and my grandmother and her parents return home with the foreigner through darkness of late afternoon, walking through fields of snow beneath starless sky. And all that night they hear the strange foreigner whispering to himself inside his room.

  ‘The next day there are rumours in the village. The relatives of the farmer are not happy that he lives and that his land is not theirs. People say that a sorcerer lives in the home of my great-grandfather; that he called upon the powers of hell to save life of farmer. That night soldiers came to the house of my great-grandparents, led by a priest. They pulled my grandmother and her parents from the home and surrounded it and tore it apart, hoping to kill the foreigner as he hid inside. But the foreigner was already gone.

  ‘He slipped away just before the crowd arrived, and fled through the woods, heading in the direction of the village, moving slowly under the terrible weight of his box. Before he escaped my grandmother appeared in the trees behind him and called his name.

  ‘He turned and placed his finger over his lips. But my grandmother spoke his name again and pointed to the box he carried under his arm, wrapped in oilskins. “Tell me what you carry,” she demand, “or I’ll call your name and bring the soldiers upon you.” The foreigner saw she was not bluff, so he drew near, and with glittering eyes he unwrap box and kneel before my grandmother, and open the lid so she can behold contents. My grandmother looked inside, and at that moment she understand the nature of the foreigner’s gift, and how it can heal the injured and cure the sick and why it could also bring great suffering. “Where did this come from?” she demand. “What will you do with it?” The foreigner did not reply. He closed lid of box and turned back on my grandmother and disappeared into the trees.’

  Stasia took Danyl’s hand and clasped it between her own and said, ‘This is the story of how my grandmother came to have the gift of healing. So you understand now.’

  Danyl nodded, absorbing the tale. ‘Fascinating,’ he said. He frowned. ‘But it doesn’t really answer any of the questions I—’

  ‘Hssst.’ Stasia held up her hand. ‘Listen.’ Danyl stopped speaking; he listened. He heard nothing, but she said, ‘It is not safe for you here.’ She led him towards the window. ‘You must go. Now.’ She opened the window and tugged him towards it. ‘This way. Don’t let them see you.’

  ‘I still don’t understand. Who is they? What was in the foreigner’s box?’

  ‘There is no time. We must speak again. When can you meet? Tonight?’

  ‘Tonight? Yes. Yes! Tonight.’ Danyl smiled. ‘We’ll have dinner together.’

  ‘Dinner?’ Stasia considered this. ‘Yes. We will eat while we talk.’

  ‘Great. Do you know the Dolphin Cafe?’

  ‘I am knowing.’

  ‘I’ll meet you there at seven.’

  Stasia nodded seriously. ‘Yes. Seven. We will meet and discuss pact.’

  ‘Yes.’ Yes! Success! Danyl didn’t have answers to his questions, exactly, but he had his date. And the date was an opportunity to get those answers. Maybe romance would work where gentle interrogation had failed. He turned to the window, then paused. ‘Pact? What pact?’

  ‘We make pact.’ Stasia pointed to his ankle. ‘I heal leg. You promise to perform for me secret task. Pact is sacred.’

  ‘Oh, the sacred pact.’ He had forgotten about the sacred pact. ‘Yes,’ he assured her, ‘we’ll talk about the sacred pact. And other things too. We’ll get to know each other.’

  ‘Your task is very dangerous. I give to you tonight at seven.’ She put her hand on the back of his head and pushed him through her window. ‘Now you go. Please.’

  Danyl walked along the road and sang ‘The Danyl Song’, which was the word ‘Danyl’ repeated over and over to the tune of Mozart’s ‘Queen of the Night’ aria. He reserved this song for moments of great personal triumph and there had been few occasions to sing it of late. But he sang it now.

  He crossed Aro Street and entered the park, keeping to the warm shade beneath the trees. It was midday and the midsummer sun shone down on the path, the flowers, the dry grass. His voice trilled and soared.

  A date with Stasia! And at the Dolphin Cafe. Brilliant. The food at the Dolphin was nice enough but the owner, Eleanor, was a childhood friend of Verity’s and a ferocious anti-Danyl bigot. How delicious it would be to walk into the Dolphin hand-in-hand with Stasia, her lush, perfect body bursting out of her red silk ninja outfit, confident that Eleanor would report everything back to Verity in exquisite detail. Everything was working out for him.

  Although he was a little worried about the pact, and the secret task. And, lurking in the back of his mind, the possibility that Stasia had really healed his ankle, impossible though that was. He tried to calm his fears. Maybe he hadn’t injured his ankle that badly, and it was just coincidence that Stasia performed her healing at roughly the same time the injury repaired itself. Yes, more than likely. But still, she did do something to cause that tremendous heat, and make him black out and sleep through the destruction of his room, a subject of which she obviously knew more than she’d thus far revealed.

  He’d find out more tonight. Question her closely. Pay strict attention to her . . .

  Danyl stopped, abandoning his train of thought. Something was wrong. ‘The Danyl Song’ trailed off and he looked around. He stood in the centre of Te Aro Park. It was lunchtime. The park should be filled with people eating breakfast, potheads staring at leaves, students playing with Frisbees and meditating. Instead the area was deserted.

  Then a man in a black robe stepped out from behind a tree, his face hidden beneath his cowl. Danyl heard movement behind him and he turned. Another man in black blocked the path to the street. Then two more stepped from behind trees to either side of him.

  Danyl was surrounded. The park wasn’t deserted—it was cleared for
an ambush. This was the moment he had dreaded all year. Campbell’s revenge.

  They called themselves the SSS, he remembered. Sapiens Sapiens Sapiens. Didn’t Sapiens mean ‘wise’? Maybe these people were open to reason. ‘You’re making a mistake,’ he called out to the faceless figures in black as they closed in on him. ‘I spoke with the Campbell Walker yesterday,’ he cried, whirling. ‘Your boss. We made a truce.’

  ‘A truce you broke.’

  Danyl turned. Campbell stood before him in his silver-trimmed robe, his cowl thrown back, a horrible grin on his horrible, acne-scarred face. He looked Danyl up and down and said, ‘Impudent fool. I warned you to stay away from the Wellness Centre.’

  ‘Campbell.’ Danyl affected a sincere smile. ‘No. I haven’t been near the place.’

  ‘Oh, really? Then why did my men see you sneak out of there five minutes ago? And what happened to your crippled leg, traitor? Yesterday you were in crutches, and today, why here you are, completely healed.’

  ‘Campbell—’

  ‘Silence! I told you to stay away from her!’ Campbell’s eyes blazed with hatred. ‘You don’t learn, do you, you stupid little insect.’

  Danyl drew himself up, meeting Campbell’s gaze with dignity. He glanced about at the circle of black-robed men surrounding him and said, ‘You think I’m afraid of you, Campbell? Let me tell you something—and I want all your lackeys to hear this. The sad, pathetic truth about the Campbell Walker.’ He paused for effect and then ran for the nearest tree.

  Surprised shouts. The circle closed in on him. He grabbed a low branch and swung up. His feet scrambled against the trunk and slipped, and pedalled in mid-air.

  ‘Seize him!’

  Black-robed cultists swarmed around the base of the tree. Danyl kicked out but someone grabbed his ankle and pulled him down in a shower of leaves and twigs. He landed on his back, the wind knocked out of him. Campbell filled his field of vision, blocking out the sun. His foot descended on Danyl’s face.

  ‘A fascinating creature, the sponge.’

  ‘Oh?’

  The elevator stopped at the basement. Campbell pulled at the steel-framed door and it slid open with a grating, screeching sound. ‘Shut it behind us,’ he ordered. ‘Or the lift is stuck on this level.’

  Danyl obeyed. They walked towards the ramp sloping up to the back courtyard. A drizzle of rain waterfalled over the entrance, draining away into the grates in the floor.

  ‘Sponges first appear in the fossil record 750 million years ago, long before the evolution of humans or even our remote ancestors. Mammalian life is a contemptible newborn compared to the sponge. I suppose you’re wondering why I’m telling you all of this.’

  Danyl was only half-listening. He was thinking about Verity, and about his book, which was almost finished. He reminded himself to print out his latest draft and give it to Verity to hide in her archive.

  ‘It’s time you knew more about the DoorWay Project,’ Campbell continued. ‘Things are moving quickly now. Faster than even I expected, just as I predicted they would. You need to understand what’s happening if you are to document these momentous events. That’s why a working knowledge of sponge metabolism is crucial.’

  The basement was filled with boxes and shipping crates stacked to the ceiling. Campbell’s disciples swarmed everywhere—there were at least a dozen of them now, all cast from the same mould: pale, repellent imitations of Campbell who repeated dialogue from Monty Python routines back and forth to each other, endlessly, and even when they weren’t they spoke as though they were. They ran about the basement, shouting and crashing pellet-jacks into each other.

  Campbell waved to them. He shouted to Danyl, over the chaos, ‘Like most multicellular organisms, sponges have specialist cells. You and I have cells that make up out heart and lung tissue, epithelial cells that make up our skin, neural and glial cells that make up our brains, and so on. Do you follow me?’

  ‘Sure.’

  They walked up the ramp. It was a bleak gray day. The hills were hung with clouds. Danyl wore a raincoat, but Campbell seemed impervious to the rain and cold. He wore his usual combo of shorts, puffy shirt and black leather jacket. The drizzle coated his glasses and magnified his eyes. ‘We mere mammals cannot change what our cells are. We cannot turn our kidney cells into brain cells. But the sponge can. What do you think of that? We humans, we pride ourselves on being the pinnacle of evolution, but in many ways it is the sponge that is the jewel of life.’

  The reached the top of the ramp, and the courtyard came into view. A tow-truck attached to a stainless-steel tank was parked in the centre; a thick cable pumped water from the tank into one of the shallow trenches cut into the concrete. Half of the trenches were already full. Steam rose from the water. A salty, briny smell filled the air.

  Campbell gestured at the trenches. ‘We’re filling these with seawater. Can you guess what we’ll grow in them?’

  ‘Sponges?’

  Campbell clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I told you your IQ was higher than 105. Although, the correct plural is spongi. I’m trusting you a lot by telling you this.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  They neared the trenches. Another mob of Campbell’s disciples oversaw the pumping operation. There was something wrong with one of the machines. The disciples shouted at each other, and then a scuffle broke out. Danyl watched with amusement, Campbell with exasperation. There had been many such fights recently.

  ‘They’re excited,’ Campbell explained. ‘They’re all lions—future leaders of humanity. It’s hard for men of great will to work together.’

  The scrapping figures converged into a group. There were screams as one person fell to the ground and the rest surrounded him. Campbell took Danyl’s arm and led him out of sight, behind the tanker, while the screams grew louder.

  He coughed. ‘So, unlike mammals, a sponge can re-task its cells. You remember my recent talk about connected graphs?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘Networks of cells function like connected graphs. And some rare spongi secrete a compound that optimises the topography of these graphs. This substance has extraordinary properties. We call it the DoorWay Compound. You see how it connects to the name of the DoorWay Project?’

  ‘I think so. Yes.’

  ‘We have grown a single sponge in a tank in the third-floor biochemistry lab and successfully extracted small quantities of the DoorWay compound. Now we scale up. Once these trenches are ready we’ll flood them with the sperm and eggs of a specific species of sponge. In a month’s time we’ll have enough spongi to extract millilitre quantities of DoorWay. Enough for large-scale animal testing. All this must remain absolutely secret.’

  ‘Sure,’ Danyl said. Campbell pushed him back against the tanker and towered over him. ‘I’m serious, writer. I have enemies. Colleagues I trusted who then turned on me. Not a word, not a whisper of the DoorWay Project must escape the walls of this compound. We must remain on guard. Hypervigilant. I don’t wish to alarm you—’ He glanced around, leaned in close and whispered hotly in Danyl’s ear. ‘There may even be spies within the building. Tiny amounts of DoorWay have already gone missing. Report any suspicious activity. Do not fail me. I know you think of me as a kind of an older brother. Gifted, charismatic, brilliant. But I have my dark side too. Do not provoke my wrath.’

  Danyl tried to look serious, cowed, while remembering Campbell’s every word so he could transcribe this latest rant into his novel. He would write it up before delivering it to Verity in the morning.

  Another scream came from the other side of the tanker, followed by another splash. Another ragged chorus of cheers rang out.

  ~

  Danyl lay on the grass beneath the tree, curled into the foetal position, his arms covering his head. There was a bitter, metallic taste in his mouth. He rolled face-down and spat out a film of blood-tinged saliva. His breath came in dee
p, shuddering gasps. He climbed onto his hands and knees, and then stood up.

  The park was empty. Campbell and the SSS were gone.

  His clothes were filthy: a coating of blood and grass stains covered his trousers. And this was his only pair of pants. He gritted his teeth, vowing a terrible revenge, and brushed the worst of it off. Then he spat out more blood and set off down the path towards his home.

  Part II

  13

  Into the wild

  The clearing was filled with pale green light and walled by beech trees, their trunks towering above the sea of shoulder-high ferns. A narrow path wound between the fronds; columns of sunlight broke through the canopy at irregular intervals. Insects buzzed between the shafts, drifting in the still, warm air; nimble fantails picked them off. Clumsy tui crashed about in the branches overhead.

  ‘I found it!’

  Danyl’s head and shoulders popped up through the ferns. ‘Where?’

  Steve’s head appeared in another region of the clearing. ‘Over here.’

  Danyl thrashed his way through the foliage to join him. Steve pulled weeds and vines away from a round stone structure covered in graffiti. When they finished they stepped back to inspect their find.

  It was waist-high and roughly two metres in diameter. The base was made of old and worn stone blocks, but the thick circular slab covering the opening of the well—placed there, presumably, to prevent children, drunks, animals and distracted and confused residents of the Aro Valley from falling down it—was made of concrete and looked recent.

  Steve recited, ‘At dawn the Order meets at the well and proceeds to the temple.’

  Danyl nodded. ‘But who were the Order? Why did they meet here? And which way is the temple?’ He looked about: in each direction the carpet of ferns receded into the green, undersea haze of the trees.