Steve indicated an area of garden away from the house. A cluster of shoulder-high tomato plants stood staked to wooden frames. Basil plants flourished around their base.
‘Tomatoes? You want to steal them?’ Danyl considered the ethics of this. Taking the tomatoes was probably OK, he decided, but they weren’t more interesting than a ruined temple.
‘Not the plants. Look closer.’
Danyl saw it now. There was a person crouched between the vines, face hidden by a straw hat, head turning about as if searching for something. Steve whispered, ‘They know we’re here but they don’t know where we are. You go around behind. I’ll confront them.’
Danyl crept along the treeline while Steve made his way to the centre of the garden. The figure crouching in the tomato patch stiffened once Steve came into view, tracking him as he walked. Danyl edged closer.
Steve held out his hand and addressed the tomatoes. ‘We know you’re in there. We just want to talk.’
There was a rustle and explosion of leaves. An elderly woman with silver hair burst from behind the plants. She wore dirt-stained trousers, an apron, a white shirt and a wide-brimmed straw hat. She carried a trowel in one hand. Her eyes were wide with terror. She ran towards the treeline until Danyl leaped out at her and she squealed and changed direction, heading for the house.
He yelled to Steve, ‘She’s making a break for it!’
‘Flank her! Don’t let her get inside!’
Danyl gave chase, driving the woman towards Steve, who intercepted her in the courtyard. He held her shoulders and she slapped at him ineffectually with her trowel until he pushed her down into a canvas deckchair.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘Why were you hiding from us?’
The old woman did not reply. She gaped at Steve in terror and emitted tiny whining sounds, and then stammered, ‘Don’t hurt me. Take anything you want.’
‘I want answers! Talk!’
‘I think she thinks we’re criminals,’ said Danyl as he trotted up to join them.
‘Criminals?’ Steve chuckled. ‘Us? Is that what you think?
The woman whimpered, wide-eyed with fear.
‘But nothing could be further from the truth.’ Steve gave a reassuring smile. ‘I’m a psychologist. My credentials.’ He opened his wallet and flashed his post-graduate student ID card, which, Danyl knew, merely qualified him for free photocopying at the university library. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured her. ‘We’re not here to hurt you. And you’re not in any trouble. Yet. I just need to take a look around and ask you a few questions.’
She seemed impressed by the card and Steve’s air of kindly authority. She said, her voice still trembling, ‘A psychologist?’
‘That’s right. I’m a doctor.’
Danyl coughed.
‘You can call me Doctor Steve.’ He gestured at Danyl. ‘This person is my assistant. He’s like a nurse.’
‘He doesn’t look like a nurse,’ the woman replied, eyeing Danyl with suspicion. ‘He’s been in a fight.’
Danyl said, ‘I was attacked by a cult of—’
But Steve cut him off. ‘He walked into a door.’
‘Where are his trousers?’
‘They were damaged in the incident.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t understand any of this. What do you want?’
Steve knelt down beside the woman and said kindly, ‘Let’s start with your name.’
‘I’m Pearl. Pearl Clements.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Pearl.’ Steve held out his hand and Pearl shook it, still trembling. Steve broadened his smile but did not release his grasp. ‘Now, Pearl. The smart thing for you to do is cooperate and tell us everything we need to know.’
‘About what?’
‘We’re investigating certain matters that have come to our attention,’ Steve explained. ‘You and your house have come to our attention.’
‘Ask her about the temple,’ said Danyl.
‘I’m getting to that.’ Steve leaned closer to the old woman. ‘Let me give you a bit of background, Pearl. The human species is about two hundred—’
‘Tell us about your temple,’ Danyl said. ‘Over there through the trees.’
‘The temple? My uncle built it.’
‘When?’
‘A long time ago. Before I was born.’
She seemed calmer now. Danyl asked, ‘What year? And who used it?’
‘They built it during the war. The Great War. There’s a plaque with a date in there, on the back wall. It was used by the Order.’
‘The Order?’ Steve said, and he and Danyl both leaned in closer. ‘What Order?’
‘You’re hurting my hand,’ she protested. Steve did not loosen his grip. ‘The Order of Thrice-Wise Hermes,’ she said, fear returning to her voice, which was also tinged with pride when she added, ‘I’m the last surviving member.’
Danyl brushed away the leaves. The plaque was brass, fixed into a block of marble on the base of the far wall. He took out his notebook, knelt down and copied the inscription:
This holy place consecrated in the name of Thrice-Wise Hermes the divine intellect by the High Hierophant in the presence of his true worshippers on this dawn, the 3rd of Akhet of the 6153rd year, which the Christians call the 30th of July, 1914.
Danyl cleared more leaves, widening the circle around the marble block. Most of the wall was covered in mould, decades thick, but on the area around the plaque there was only a thin patina of mildew. It had been cleaned some time in the last dozen years.
He inspected the other walls. They’d been scrubbed too: there were regions where the mould was heavy, but it was high up, out of reach. Looking closer he saw hundreds of cracks in the stone that were filled with plaster. Damage from falling trees, Danyl guessed. Also repaired recently.
He returned to the garden. Steve sat on a lawn chair with his feet on the picnic table while Pearl served him tea from a china teaset. Whatever tissue of lies Steve had spun had clearly snared Pearl, who fussed over ‘Doctor Steve’, measuring sugar into his tea and apologising for her lack of fresh baking. ‘I only have scones.’
Danyl joined them. ‘Pearl was telling me about her Order,’ said Steve. ‘Apparently it was founded by a mysterious foreign traveller.’
‘The plaque in the temple mentions a High Hierophant.’ Danyl showed him the transcript in his notebook.
‘That’s what they called him,’ said Pearl. ‘He was a great man who arrived in the Aro Valley after a long and dangerous journey, bearing with him a secret which he shared with his few chosen followers who built the temple in his honour. Tragically his name and identity are lost to history.’
Danyl said to Steve, ‘Has to be Bludkraft.’
‘Agreed.’
‘What? Who?’
‘Never mind.’ Danyl leaned across the table. ‘Pearl, that temple has been abandoned for many decades. But in the last few years someone repaired it—plastering the stone, cleaning the plaque and the inscription on the walls. Was it you?’
‘Me?’ She shook her head. ‘No. The Order of Thrice-Wise Hermes is not about a jumble of stones in the trees. It’s about wisdom. Truth—’
‘Yeah. Who repaired the temple?’
Pearl made a face. ‘It was Sutcliffe.’
Danyl and Steve exchanged glances. ‘Sutcliffe Parsons? The Satanist?’
She replied, ‘You know about him. Everyone does. He came here with his young girl, to work on the temple and speak to my father before he passed on into the afterworld. When the police arrested Sutcliffe they told me—’ She looked flustered, pouring milk and sugar into Steve’s tea while he smiled at her like a bishop granting absolution. ‘They told me that the temple was where he did those things to that poor girl. I try not to think about it.’
‘So Parsons rebuilt the temple before he went to
prison. And he spoke about it with your father? I thought you said your uncle built it.’
‘He did.’ Pearl finished spreading jam onto Steve’s scone and then sat down beside him, flushed with pleasure at the intensity of their interest. ‘I’d better tell you everything.
‘It all started about twenty years ago. My mother died—the cancer took her—and I moved back here to look after my father. The first thing I did was clean out this old house. There were newspapers piled in the bathroom higher than my head, or even yours. Old pots of home-made jam from the 1960s in the pantry. Old bridesmaids’ dresses coated with spider-webs and reeking of mothballs. You know how some people are, stockpiling old things.
‘When the task seemed too much and the house got too claustrophobic I went outside and worked in the garden, and after a few days I stumbled across the old temple. I grew up in this house and I was always afraid and fascinated by it. My sisters and I dared each other to go inside, but we never did, and our parents warned us to stay away from it. My mother wanted it torn down, but what would we do with the stone? My father would only tell us it belonged to his brother. We knew he died during the Great War and that my father didn’t like to talk about him, so we never learned why he built it, or why it was abandoned.
‘When I stumbled across the temple again as a grown-up it was just a ruin, reclaimed by the bush, crumbling and filled with rotting leaves and the fallen limbs of rotten trees. You couldn’t even go inside. It was smaller than I remembered—things from childhood always are—and I just walked around it and then went back to the house and put it out of my mind.
‘It took days to clear away all my mother’s rubbish and debris, but eventually the house was liveable. While clearing out the final cupboard I discovered a box, hidden away on a high shelf. Inside it was a photo album containing pictures I’d never seen before, of my uncle but also a lot of other people I didn’t recognise. There were books on occultism and ancient Egypt, and photographs of occult rituals, and I recognised the site of the rituals immediately—the temple. I took the box to my father, whose eyes filled with tears when he saw his long-dead brother, and I asked him about the photos and my uncle, and the old temple. He stared at the pictures for a long minute, and then told me what he knew.
‘My uncle’s name was Jack Clements. He was a builder. He moved to the Aro Valley in the 1900s, and in 1910 he sent for his younger brother—my father—to join him in the trade. They worked on half the old houses in the valley, and together they bought this land. They planned to build on it, but they were still laying the foundations when everything changed. Jack fell in love with a woman named Anna.’ Pearl frowned. ‘Anna something. I don’t recall her last name. She was an artist, a bohemian. Jack built a home for her down on Devon Street and went to live with her there. They weren’t married—Anna didn’t believe in it—and in most places it would have been a scandal but the valley has always been a haven for lovers and free spirits, and the only person who was shocked was my father. Nevertheless, he moved in with them. He was young, he had nowhere else to go. Anna seemed like a nice girl at first, clever and pretty and kind, but my Father soon discovered she was more—and less—than she appeared.
‘Anna read books written in foreign languages, which she kept hidden in a chest beneath her bed. She always had more money than she earned. She vanished for days at a time. And early every morning while everyone slept, she rose and dressed and stole out of the house and down the street, disappearing deeper into the valley. Uncle Jack pretended not to notice this—he was in love with her. But my father vowed to discover her secrets. So one winter morning he slept in his clothes and in the hour before dawn, when he heard the door of the room she shared with Jack creak open and her footsteps soft on the steps, he rose and followed her.
‘She slipped out the back door and hurried through the sunrise to the crossroads on Aro Street, where she met with a group of people. My father recognised them; they were other residents of the valley. He followed the group up Epuni Street to the old well—they called it the new well back then—in the clearing at the top of the path. There they met a man in a dark suit with a hat shadowing his face. To my father’s amazement, the group bowed before this man, and then, to his greater astonishment, Anna stood beside him and the group turned and bowed before her. Then the foreign man spoke to them in a quiet voice. My father could only make out a few scattered words: “the Order”, “the High Hierophant”. None of it made sense to him and he crept away before he was seen.
‘He returned home in a state of shock. He told his brother what he’d witnessed and Jack agreed to confront Anna that night. And he did. My father lay in bed listening to their angry voices rise and fall in the next room. My uncle’s shouts. Anna’s denials. Then the voices dropped to a low whisper and Anna’s voice murmured on and on, past midnight, until my father drifted off to sleep, waking early to the sound of footsteps on the stairs and hurrying out the door. He looked out the window and saw Anna and my uncle walking hand in hand, heading towards Epuni Street and the old well.
‘My uncle never revealed what happened at the well, or what Anna was involved in. But he stopped attending church, and came home Sunday evening dropping from exhaustion, with clay and stone dust under his fingernails. It was obvious he was building something. But what? Where?
‘He wouldn’t say. And my father was just a boy—he was distracted by events in the wider world. The Great War was coming. When it broke out he lied about his age to join the army—he was just sixteen. My uncle volunteered as well, and they were assigned to the Engineers Corps. But they shipped out to different theatres. My father served in Sinai and Palestine. He never saw any fighting, but Uncle Jack went to France where he was killed at the Somme in September 1916. His possessions were sent on to my father: a few books, some money, two letters from Anna.
‘My father returned home in 1919. He went back to Anna’s home on Devon Street, to return her letters and talk about Jack. But the house was filled with strangers. Anna was dead too. She died of the Spanish flu.’
Pearl’s eyes lost their faraway look. She stirred her tea. ‘Do you know about the great flu?’
‘Of course we know,’ Steve replied, speaking with a mouth full of scone. ‘The first global pandemic.’ He turned to Danyl. ‘You know it killed more people than the war?’
‘Everyone knows that.’
‘Ah, but did you know that people thought that aspirin made you immune to the disease so they overdosed on it and died, and that accounted for many of the fatalities? Others believed the virus travelled through the new sewer system, so they installed their own septic tanks in their gardens. The pandemic hit Te Aro hard,’ Steve lectured. ‘Mass fatalities. Panic.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Many experts believe the emergence of the disease was no accident. Pearl, have you ever heard of the Royal Society?’
‘Steve.’ Danyl shook his head. ‘Not now.’
‘But they—’
‘Let’s try and stay focused.’ Danyl turned to Pearl. ‘Please continue. What happened to your father after the war?’
She smiled, nervous again, and said, ‘All he had left was this land and the unfinished foundations of their house. He moved up here to finish the building, and that’s when he found the temple hidden away in the trees. Inside it he found a photo album wrapped in oilskin, and some old books and papers. He put them away in a box and set to work on the house, and he always expected someone to show up at his door one day to talk to him about the temple, and whatever Jack and Anna and their companions were doing there. But years passed. He met my mother. They had a family. He forgot about the temple and the group at the well, until seventy years later I found that box in the back of the wardrobe.
‘Looking at the old photographs of my uncle I felt a profound, mystical connection with him, and his mysterious fiancée, Anna. If you examine the pictures carefully it’s obvious that she was a person of great importance within the Order.’
‘Perhaps she was the High Priestess?’ Danyl suggested.
Pearl bristled at this. ‘The Order of Thrice-Wise Hermes was an enlightened, progressive sect. They would never have used a term like ‘priestess’. I believe Anna’s title was Deputy High Hierophant.’ Pearl beamed at them. ‘You see, after studying the photos and piecing together the scant clues left behind, I’m convinced the Order was about equality. About truth. And about a profound—’
Steve clicked his fingers. ‘We’re getting off track again. Tell us about Sutcliffe Parsons. How did he find out about the temple?’
She cast her eyes down and lowered her voice. ‘I don’t know. He just appeared here one day, and kept coming back. Him and his girl. They rebuilt the temple, working on it during nights. Weekends. They sat at our table and ate our food. They asked my father about the Order. He didn’t know anything, of course, and I didn’t trust Sutcliffe enough to tell him what I knew. And I always felt that he understood more than he let on, maybe even more than me, but that he was missing some crucial detail.
‘Sutcliffe looked through the photographs. The old books. Anna’s letters to Jack. He didn’t find whatever he sought—but he came back again and again. He spent hours copying the runes and carvings from the temple walls. He pressed my father for any details. Names. Addresses. He begged him for memories: anything he could recall about his brother, Anna, the Order. The old man at the well. But it was so long ago, and my father was already a sick man.’
Pearl took a sip of her tea. ‘Sutcliffe didn’t come to his funeral. Instead I returned home from the service to find my house had been broken into. Ransacked. The only thing that was taken was the box. I knew it was Parsons, and I told the police as much—but they had no proof, and in the end it didn’t matter. The wisdom of the Order is not to be found in some dusty old books, but in the union between—’
‘Did you see Parsons again after your father died?’ Steve asked.
Pearl shook her head. ‘A few weeks later he was arrested. The girl’s grandmother followed her one evening and caught her in the temple with Sutcliffe. Fortunately he had the good grace to plead guilty, and all the evidence of the trial was suppressed. No one else knows about the temple, or the Order.’ She beamed again. ‘Except, of course, for you two.’
Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley Page 15