He walked around it, tugging away more weeds. ‘That’s odd.’ He stopped a few paces from it and, brushing aside the ferns, knelt down and scraped away the dirt and leaves from the forest floor. ‘Paving stones,’ he said, revealing a buried jumble of broken pavement. ‘There was a path here, a long time ago.’
Steve asked, ‘Do we follow it?’
‘Why wouldn’t we?’
‘Aren’t you meeting Stasia today?’
Danyl checked the time on his phone, then slipped it back into the pocket of his dressing-gown. ‘Not for hours. Wait here.’
He walked back to the edge of the clearing where the trail wound between the trees leading back to the top of Epuni Street. His crutch leaned against a fallen trunk on the side of the path. He picked it up.
His ankle was healed. That was undeniable. Stasia had healed him. That, too, was undeniable. He remembered Campbell’s warning, ‘She is more powerful than you could imagine,’ and felt a thrill run through him. Yes, she had used her power to heal him, but Danyl could never admit that to Steve so he had bought along his crutch, explaining that the body’s natural ability to heal itself was a well-documented process, and that Stasia coincidentally performed her own healing ritual at the same time his ankle mended itself. So logically, Danyl had shouted over Steve’s protestations, his foot was still recovering, and it made sense to bring his crutches with him in case he stumbled and injured himself again. But two crutches were difficult to carry, so he just brought along the one. Steve glowered when Danyl returned to the well, crutch tucked under his arm, but said nothing.
They set off along the old stone path. It was easy to follow, leading up into the hills south of the valley. As they walked, Steve talked. ‘I did some digging. I checked the university library for material on Wolfgang Bludkraft. Their catalogue listed the same biography we found in the box, only their copy was checked out five years ago and never returned. It was issued to Sutcliffe Parsons.’
‘He must have borrowed it just before he went to prison. Do you think that’s the copy we found?’
‘No. The university marks all of its books. And I checked the libraries at Canterbury and Otago. Parsons borrowed the same text from them via interloan and never returned them. He deliberately took all available copies of the book out of circulation. He didn’t want anyone else reading about Bludkraft while he was in prison.’
‘And now he’s free and back in the valley,’ Danyl said. ‘The letter on the back of that photograph mentioned a treasure. Do you think there’s something valuable hidden in the valley somewhere? Is that why Parsons returned?’
Steve did not reply. They had reached a fork in the path. The broken stone slabs continued up the valley but deep wheel ruts intersected the path, diverging away through the trees. They looked around, nodded mute agreement and left the path to follow the new trail.
‘I’ve been thinking about Bludkraft,’ Steve said. ‘According to the biography you stole—’
‘We stole.’
‘According to his biography, his archaeological expeditions centred on the Saqqara necropolis. This is the oldest burial site in Egypt, dating back to the first dynasty. Bludkraft was searching for the lost tomb of Imhotep, which is still hidden somewhere between the sands of the Saqqara desert. You know all about Imhotep, of course.’
‘No, I don’t know about Imhotep. Please, Steve, tell me about Imhotep.’
Steve smirked. He took great pleasure in Danyl’s ignorance of what he called ‘Basic General Knowledge’, which was anything Steve knew that Danyl didn’t. ‘As most people are aware, Imhotep lived in the twenty-seventh century BCE. He was a chancellor during the third dynasty, but his fame was as a physician, an engineer and an architect. He designed the first pyramid and wrote the first book on medicine, based on empirical principles instead of magic. And he invented the column.’
‘Someone had to invent the column? Isn’t it obvious?’
‘To us, yes. But it was a revolutionary breakthrough at the time. They rewarded Imhotep’s genius by making him a god.’
Danyl snorted.
‘For two thousand years after Imhotep’s death they built temples in his name. And for five millennia man has searched for his tomb, designed by Imhotep himself before his death, built somewhere around Saqqara and concealed so cunningly it’s never been found. Unless,’ Steve said meaningfully, ‘it was located and secretly looted by Wolfgang Bludkraft. Consider this. What if Bludkraft stumbled across something in Imhotep’s tomb? What if he took it back to Vienna with him, and whatever it was made him wealthy and powerful? What if it also attracted enemies? Thieves. Assassins. What if he survived their attacks but was forced to flee, and so he came here, bringing with him the thing he uncovered in the tomb of the old god. And what if this artefact is here, somewhere, hidden in the valley? And what if Sutcliffe Parsons— Are you even listening to me?’
‘What? Not really.’ Danyl knelt and inspected the ground. ‘The wheel ruts end here.’
They were in a sheltered, sunlit clearing in the lee of the hills. In the centre was a circle of heavy round stones, blackened by flame. Danyl said, ‘It’s an old fire-pit,’ and poked through the ashes with his crutch.
‘Maybe this is the temple?’ Steve strolled around the edge of the clearing. ‘Maybe the order were, like, druids?’
Danyl crossed to the far side. A bathtub sat half-buried in the ground, half-filled with rotten leaves. Beyond it were vegetable beds gone to seed, and beyond them grew a row of currant bushes and trellised blackberries.
‘I don’t think this was the temple. I think someone lived here.’
‘Who?’
‘Aren’t you supposed to be an expert on local history?’
‘We’re beyond the boundaries of the valley. I’m outside my jurisdiction.’ Steve saw something in the weeds and crouched down. ‘What’s this?’
Danyl joined him. Amid the trees opposite the entry point to the clearing were eight concrete blocks, sunk into the ground. ‘Supporting piles,’ he said. ‘There was a house here once.’
‘Pretty small house.’ The piles were close together.
‘A hut, then.’ Danyl looked around. A flash of reflected sunlight caught his eye: a tree grew in the centre of the piles. It must have been twenty years old, at least. A full-length dress mirror was attached to the tree by thin wire cables looped through holes in the corner of the glass then tied around the trunk. An old steel sink rested in the tall grass at the base of the mirror. Someone once used this space as a dressing room, Danyl realised. Someone had once lived in the ruins of the hut.
He stood before the mirror and inspected his reflection. It was worse than usual. The SSS ambush earlier that day hadn’t caused any serious injuries but his lip and left ear were swollen and one of his eyes was black. The real damage had been inflicted upon his only pair of trousers, which had such severe grass stains that not even he could wear them in public. They were back at home, hanging on his washing line, washed and drying, so to protect his dignity he now wore his dressing gown with an old, French-cuffed shirt beneath it. He looked, he decided, like a roughed-up pirate. Not bad. He adjusted his collar, turned away from the mirror and said, ‘Let’s try the other path.’
~
‘I was just thinking,’ said Steve.
‘That’s good,’ Danyl replied, although it generally wasn’t.
‘We need to step back. Take a look at the big picture here.’
‘OK. How?’
‘We start with the basics. First we need to ask ourselves, what’s the greatest mystery in all of human history? A mystery so vast and yet so obvious that few even know it exists.’
‘I feel sure you’re about to tell me.’
They were back on the old stone path, following it through the trees. It led them gently uphill, through diffuse green light and the music of songbirds.
‘The myste
ry is this,’ Steve said. ‘How old is our species? Humanity, I mean.’
Danyl shrugged. ‘No one knows for sure. The evolutionary timeline jumps around as new data comes to light.’
‘Right. But the current consensus is that modern, anatomical humans have been around for about 200 thousand years. For all that time you have humans capable of speech, abstract thought, advanced reasoning, and use of technology and so on. But how old is human civilisation? Maybe ten thousand years—twelve if you push it. So what happened during the other 95 per cent of human history? What were our ancestors doing for a 190 thousand years before the dawn of civilisation?’
‘They explored the world,’ said Danyl. ‘They exterminated most of the megafauna in the Americas. They killed the Neanderthals and interbred with their women.’
‘For tens of thousands of years?’
‘Why not? It all sounds pretty good to me.’
‘Maybe that’s what ordinary people did,’ Steve said. ‘But every civilisation has an intellectual elite, like Plato’s philosopher-kings, or ourselves in modern-day society. What did they do?’
‘They worshiped the fertility goddess. They drank fermented honey and went on vision quests.’
‘Maybe they did those things for a while.’ Steve sounded irritated. ‘But for a 190 thousand years? What else did they devote their intellects—which were, remember, no less than ours—towards? Food was plentiful. They lived in warm, comfortable climates, give or take an occasional ice age, so they had no need for shelter, materials, technology or the distractions of the physical sciences. A genius born into this environment had nothing but freedom to develop their ideas. Take a look at the cave drawings in Chauvet—only thirty thousand years old but they look like paintings by Matisse or Picasso. So there lies the mystery. What was the intellectual output of early modern humans and why didn’t they leave any trace of their accomplishments?’
‘And you’ve solved this riddle?’
‘I have,’ said Steve. ‘It’s obvious. They were psychologists.’
Danyl tried not to smile. ‘Just like you. Is this what your secret research project is about?’
‘No, this is a separate theory. But it makes sense, yes?’
‘You think Stone Age hunter-gatherers spent their spare time in group therapy or studying the Stroop effect?’
‘Not therapy as we know it. You have to remember the time scales involved. The human intellectuals of tens of thousands of years ago were tens of thousands of years ahead of us. Our modern therapeutic tools would have looked like clumsy children’s toys to them. You agree, surely, that we only perceive reality through the mind, so when the early humans achieved insight and mastery of their own minds they became the masters of reality. That’s why they didn’t succumb to the sickness of technological civilisation. They progressed beyond that. All our so-called knowledge is just an echo of this ancient wisdom.’
Danyl scratched his ear. ‘Why aren’t there any physical remnants of this super-enlightenment? And how was this knowledge lost?’
‘There’s no physical evidence because, obviously, advanced psychology cannot be taught. It has to be experienced antiheterophenomenolologically. As to how it was lost, some point to the rise of agriculture but I’d go back further than that and blame the development of language.’
‘Putting the validity of this hypothesis aside for a minute, what does any of this have to do with Wolfgang Bludkraft or Imhowhatever?’
‘Because it answers one of the most fundamental questions in philosophy,’ Steve replied. ‘Where do new ideas come from? If our brains are just electrochemical systems reacting to gross changes in the physical world, how can they bring new thoughts, new concepts into existence? The answer is obvious. We remember the ancient knowledge of our distant genetic ancestors.’
‘But this is just warmed-up Platonism,’ Danyl objected, knowing it was futile to argue with Steve but unable to stop himself. ‘You claim that the origin of human knowledge is some benign, mystical source that isn’t subject to rational enquiry.’
‘Then what’s your answer?’ Steve challenged. ‘Where do new ideas come from?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Ah ha!’
‘But it’s better not to know the truth and look for a plausible theory than pretend to know the truth by believing a frankly rather stupid theory.’
‘And how’s your search for plausible truth going?’
‘I’ll keep you posted.’
‘Please,’ replied Steve. ‘In the meantime, let’s just proceed on the basis that I’m correct and assume that Imhotep was a conduit for some of this prehistoric knowledge. That would explain his prodigious genius. His polymathy. What if—and I’m just speculating here, although I’m probably right—what if, five thousand years ago, Imhotep stumbled upon some ancient repository of wisdom and even the tiny fragments he deciphered made him a god, literally, and changed human civilisation forever? And what if he took the rest of that knowledge to his grave—again, literally—hiding it for millennia in his tomb? And what if that’s what Bludkraft found, took back to Vienna and is now concealed in the Aro Valley. Think about it. Doesn’t it sound pretty reasonable?’
‘Reasonable?’
‘Yeah, reasonable.’
Danyl did not reply. What was the use? They had reached the end of the path and arrived at the bottom of a flight of broken stone steps, which led up a bank and disappeared into a tangle of shrubs and vines.
They began to climb, and their conversation ceased while they gasped and puffed and complained their way up the hillside. Several minutes later they struggled through a hedge and a bed of roses, visiting substantial destruction on each, and emerged blinking into a large, well-kept garden outside a cream-coloured cottage.
They heard piano music, faintly then louder as they neared the cottage. They crossed a courtyard with outdoor furniture. French doors opened onto a country-style kitchen. The smell of fresh baking filled the air.
Steve rapped on the door and called out. No one came. They walked around to the front of the cottage, past lavender hedges and a trickling fountain, trimmed lawns and box hedges, statues of cherubs and doves. Plaster lions flanked the front door: a gravel driveway swept up through the trees. Danyl guessed that it met with McDonald Crescent or one of the other narrow roads winding through the hills south of the valley.
‘So what now?’
‘We search the house,’ Steve said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
‘We can’t just break in. We’re not thieves.’
‘We’re not breaking in. The kitchen door is wide open. And no, we’re not thieves. We won’t steal anything, probably. We’ll just look around.’
Steve walked briskly towards the kitchen. Danyl followed, keeping up a steady stream of protests until he was distracted by something in the corner of his vision. A flash of gray in the trees beyond the house. ‘What’s that?’
Steve shaded his eyes. ‘It looks like another building.’ He patted Danyl’s elbow. ‘Go check it out, buddy. I’ll cover the house.’
‘I think we should stick together.’
Steve ignored him and marched into the kitchen, vanishing into the shaded interior of the cottage. Danyl hesitated, stepped after him, then turned and headed in the direction of the grey stone structure, visible in glimpses through the maze of leaves.
It was a temple.
It was small, about the size of a single-car garage. It was made of dark grey granite, surrounded by trees, and reached along a narrow, overgrown path. There was no door, just an opening between two carved, bas-relief columns.
Danyl turned and looked back down the path. The cottage was out of sight. He called out, ‘Steve?’
No answer. He stepped between the columns and stood on the threshold.
The temple had no roof, but the high walls and green canopy ab
ove gave its interior a submarine quality. The walls were covered with carvings in the manner of ancient Egypt: jackals, beetles, human-headed cats. The floor was stone. It was covered in dirt and leaves. On the far wall at head height was an engraving of a baboon greeting the sun. Danyl recognised it from the old photographs in the stolen album: this was where the Order conducted their rituals.
Something glinted in the half-light, an object below the baboon carving, obscured by leaves. He stepped towards it, entering the temple. A chill wind blew through the doorway. As soon as it died he heard footsteps on the path. Heavy, quick. They crunched on the gravel.
‘Steve?’
The footsteps paused, and then resumed. Louder, closer. Danyl shrank against the back wall. The footsteps stopped. Silence. Then, from just outside, came the sound of slow deep breaths.
His heart beat furiously, like a mobile phone in a tumble-dryer. He walked back towards the entrance, his feet crackling on the dead leaves, and crouched beside it and raised his crutch, ready to rain blows upon whoever—or whatever—entered. The breathing stopped.
14
The history of the Order
Steve poked his head through the door.
‘Hush,’ he whispered, as Danyl yelled abuse and threatened him with his crutch. He made a dampening motion with his hands. ‘I’ve seen something interesting. We have to keep quiet.’
‘Something interesting? Look at this! I’ve found the temple!’
Steve glanced dismissively at the stone walls, occult carvings and ancient symbols. ‘Sure, but I’ve found something really interesting.’
‘I’m sorry you find my abandoned temple covered in mystical runes so boring.’
‘Don’t be such a baby. Quick, this way. Quietly.’
They hurried down the path, back to the garden. ‘I was inside the house using their toilet,’ Steve hissed. ‘And I looked out the window and saw . . . There.’
Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley Page 14