Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  He spread his legs wide, pressed his palms against the opposite walls, and tensed his muscles. Gritting his teeth, he slowly raised his body into the air . . . and then lowered it again as his upper-body strength failed almost instantly, and his feet skidded down and bashed both his shins against the concrete steps. He gave a silent scream, over which the sounds of the approaching cultists were now very loud, and scurried back downstairs, softening his footsteps as he neared the light and noise of the fourth floor.

  He crept across the landing. A door slammed and a figure in a black robe appeared at the far end of the hall, facing directly towards him. Danyl instinctively dropped to the ground into the foetal position, but the cultist did not notice. He was holding a mobile phone, typing something into the keypad. The footsteps on the stairs grew louder.

  ‘Crawl!’ Danyl commanded his body. ‘Stand! Run!’ But he couldn’t move. The voices on the stairs drew closer still, then another door at the mid-point of the hall opened. The cultist looked up from his phone, but another black-robed figure entered the hall, concealing Danyl from view, and his legs were suddenly free from paralysis. He slithered to the end of the landing and hurried down the stairs, his armpits and bare legs slick with sweat.

  He reached the third floor, stopped and listened. The cultists weren’t following him. He was safe. For now. But he couldn’t risk another attempt on the stairway. It was too dangerous.

  Neither could he bring himself to leave. He’d come this far! Danyl stared up into the gloom and willed himself to think of another way to reach the top floor. You’re a writer, he reminded himself. Inspiration would find the path. Anything was possible if you could just imagine it—and imagination was his speciality. He fixed his gaze upon the stairs, cleared his mind and waited for a plan to come.

  But it didn’t. Eventually he sighed and admitted defeat. He’d have to find a way back through the maze, and then take the elevator back down to the basement.

  Yes. The basement. Danyl’s mood brightened. Once he reached it he would be able to open the campervan, which was his original goal all along. Sure, it galled him to get halfway to Campbell’s lair and then turn back, but his primary mission could still succeed.

  He crossed the landing with a spring in his step. What secrets might the van contain? Why were the cultists photographing it at midnight? With face-masks on.

  He stopped. Why were they wearing masks? Was there something dangerous inside the campervan? Was that why it was locked away? Some secrets are best kept secret.

  His gaze travelled to the door leading to the biochemistry lab. ‘Strictly no admittance. Profane beyond this point.’

  There were masks inside the lab, Danyl remembered. Campbell and his nerds wore them when they worked with toxic chemicals. There might even be labcoats or surgical scrubs stashed away in there, something to cover his half-nakedness while he walked home.

  He shivered again. Did he really have to go back in there? The memories of his terrible final night in the tower returned to him. The maze. The apartment. The lab. He tried to force them from his mind as he opened the door and entered the laboratory.

  Danyl staggered to the third floor and then sank onto the landing, resting his satchel—heavy with the weight of his novel—beside him. The tower was freezing in winter. Drips of icy water rained down from leaks in the roof high above. The door to the biochemistry lab was shut but through it he could hear the murmur of voices, the clinking of glass. A sign on the door read, ‘No entrance except on DoorWay business.’

  Danyl rested his knees on his elbows and rubbed his temples and thought about the maze. It had taken him hours to escape it. For a while he’d just stumbled around in the dark walking into walls and cursing Campbell’s name. Then he remembered there was, supposedly, a design to the maze, an algorithm, and if you solved it you’d find the way out. So he started counting: branches, footsteps, turns, sequences, trying to find a mathematical pattern in the darkness.

  But it was hopeless. If there was a pattern he couldn’t see it. Despair took him. He wandered at random, not knowing or caring if he was walking in a loop or reversing back and forth down the same black hall. He began to fantasise that he wasn’t in Campbell’s tower any more, that he’d slipped through a crack in the unseen architecture of things, he was somewhere else now, someplace vast and unbounded. He forgot about Campbell, about DoorWay, about everything, and lost himself to the black heart of the maze.

  But there was a pattern. It finally came to him after untold hours of aimless wandering—a mathematical sequence. Soon he could predict whether a hall would end in a branch or an intersection or a dead end. Following this sequence led him to regions he had never entered before, but the pattern remained the same. Danyl quickened his pace.

  He was shocked when he turned a corner and saw the wash of light at the end of the hall. He ran to the end, turned and there was the exit, Te Aro’s pale winter sun shining through the window above the door, the steps leading higher into the tower and back to his room.

  Now he sat on the steps, trying to think. There had been something familiar about the maze. The sensation of losing himself, of brushing against something or somewhere else. He traced it back in his mind, and then he remembered: the day he started his book. He had sat at his kitchen table writing and writing as the ideas flowed but the heart of the novel had slipped away from him, and without it he had foundered, lost the story, lost his way. Now it was back. He’d found it in the darkness, in the pattern of the maze—or it found him—and he dragged it out with him, back into reality.

  He opened his satchel, pulled out the title page of his latest draft and flipped it over. He took a pen from his pocket and wrote, ‘Final draft.’

  The light faded. An hour went by, the silence of the stairway troubled only by the scratching of his pen. Eventually he put it down and shuffled through the notes, dozens of pages of cramped hand-writing. He had it all now. Funny: his book wasn’t about Campbell at all, really. He was just incidental comedy. Light relief.

  He tucked the sheets back in his satchel and trudged up the stairs. The real world seeped back in. Verity was probably looking for him. He was supposed to meet her at the gallery. They had bought Campbell’s house today. The sale would have gone through by now. They were free.

  Danyl thought about Campbell. He should be mad at him for luring him into the maze—but instead he was glad. Now he could finish his book, and in a couple of hours he would be free of the tower, and free from Campbell forever.

  He was panting and weak from fatigue when he reached his apartment. He needed a shower—he was dripping with sweat—but first he would call Verity. Make sure everything was OK with the house. Co-ordinate their escape.

  But his front door was ajar. She must be inside, waiting for him. He entered the lounge, tossed his satchel on the couch and locked the door. The room was dark but the kitchen light was on. He called out, ‘Hello, little minx.’

  No reply. Maybe she was mad at him. He said, ‘Sweetheart?’

  A rustle of papers. What was she doing?

  He crossed over to the arch leading into the kitchen. Someone sat at the table. Someone who was not Verity. A man: Danyl’s laptop sat on the table before him, the words on the screen mirrored in his glasses. He looked up at Danyl.

  It was the Campbell Walker.

  Danyl knew what the smell was. One year ago, in this very room, hundreds of innocent little rats were gassed with ether, then dissected and entombed in the minus eighty-degree freezers lined up along the far wall. Then power to this level of the building was shut down, and the freezers defrosted and their contents slowly putrefied. Over a period of months the stench leaked out through cracks in the door seals until it saturated the entire level.

  Danyl gagged and stepped back into the stairwell. Did he really need to go in there? Then he remembered the campervan, the dark cage, the face masks of the cultists. He took off his
jacket and wrapped it around his neck so that the sleeves covered his mouth and nose, pushed open the door and stepped through.

  Dripping water. Broken glass. Rust. The light from his torch passed over the lab benches, the empty rat cages filled with rotten straw. The freezers.

  He searched the drawers and cupboards beneath the benches. He searched the autopsy bay. He searched the storerooms. He found glassware, boxes of latex gloves, bags of plastic tubes and pipette tips. But no gas masks and no surgical gowns. Not even a lab coat.

  He found the old noticeboard and examined it for clues or information. Anything. Pinned to it were receipts for rat pellets, safety instructions, pages of photocopied science geek ‘humour’: a molecular diagram of an amino acid in the shape of a small church with the title, ‘Cysteine Chapel’; a handwritten joke: ‘How many atoms in a guacamole? Avocado’s number.’ Danyl’s lip curled with contempt.

  He was on the verge of abandoning the search when the beam of his torch fell upon a tiny doorway hidden near the elevator shaft. The door was ajar. Danyl nudged it open.

  The room contained boxes and stacked piles of furniture. Danyl turned his attention to the boxes—they were all sealed, which was promising—before he realised that the furniture looked familiar. He picked up an unturned wooden chair and set it on its feet. This was his old chair, he realised, from his old apartment high up on the seventh floor. And the rest of the furniture was his too: a marked, scuffed coffee table; a couch covered in food stains; his old dining table.

  He gave the table a fond pat—he wrote his novel on it. What was it doing down here in the darkness? Who lived in his old apartment now? Some senior SSS fanatic? He shrugged and inspected the boxes. Most were marked with logos from laboratory-supply companies. He crouched down and shone his torch on the packing inventories. Nothing useful: centrifuge tubes, replacement parts. No breathing masks.

  The final box wasn’t even lab-related. It was smaller and battered with no packing slip and the words ‘Custom Uniform Tailoring’ written on the side in black marker. Danyl turned away, then wondered if Campbell ordered his surgical gowns from a costume company. He knelt down and tore open the flaps. It was filled with garments wrapped in dry-cleaning plastic. He could tell right away they weren’t gowns. He picked up one of the plastic shrouds, held it up to the torchlight and tore a hole in the wrapping. The material inside soaked up the light. It was black, black as the darkness at the heart of the maze.

  It was an SSS robe.

  23

  The rat

  He adjusted his cowl, admiring the shadow he cast on the wall. It was sinister; forbidding. Nice. He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath and stepped onto the fourth-floor landing.

  His plan was simple. There were still voices and footsteps echoing around the stairwell from the upper floors. That way was too risky, even with the robe. But it was late, well past midnight, so the dormitories would be quiet. Hopefully. His robe should take him clear across the level to the upper stairwell linking the top four floors. Perfect.

  He walked through the open doorway into the hall leading to the SSS cult dorms. The hall ran halfway to the opposite end of the building; a dozen doors opened onto it, and the walls were lined with posters: cheap reproductions of Dali and Giger paintings; low-resolution print-outs of pornstars. The air smelled of pizza and body odour and beer.

  Danyl tried to remember the layout of the level. Back when Campbell first bought the building the floor comprised several dozen tiny apartments; during the architectural carnage of the DoorWay Project these were all connected together by openings hacked through the concrete walls.

  So all the doors along the hall led into this rat’s nest of interconnected rooms; the door at the end of the hall led, if he recalled correctly, to the centralised laundry; beyond this . . . he couldn’t remember. All he knew was that the other stairway was on the far side of the building. Danyl strode down the hall, projecting confidence.

  It was quieter now. Music still vibrated through the walls, but the babble of voices he heard earlier had died. Hopefully most of the SSS were asleep, or perhaps they were out, creeping through the valley night, committing whatever fell deeds Campbell had commanded.

  He passed the first open door; he looked in and saw two cultists playing a video game on a giant flatscreen TV. They turned and glanced over their shoulders at Danyl as he passed. They were both young, and instead of wizard robes they wore black T-shirts with ‘Sapiens! Sapiens! Sapiens!’ written on the back. They registered his presence and returned to their game. Danyl kept walking, his heart pounding, waiting for a challenge: shouts, footsteps, a hand gripping his arm, jerking back his hood.

  It never came.

  The disguise worked. He kept walking, grinning beneath his cowl. He was halfway to the end of the hall—quarter of the way across the whole level. He quickened his pace, eager to leave the brightly lit hall behind, but as he neared the laundry door the handle turned and it began to open.

  Stay calm, he told himself. These dupes think you’re one of them. Have faith in their gullibility.

  The Campbell Walker walked through the open door.

  He wore his silver-trimmed robe with the cowl thrown back; his mobile phone was wedged between his shoulder and his ear. He looked up, his eyes flicked over Danyl and he said into the phone, ‘Uh huh. Uh huh.’

  Keep calm. Real calm. Don’t act suspicious. Just walk right by. He’ll never know.

  Danyl took one more step then lost his nerve. He swerved and fumbled with the handle of a side-door, opened it and slipped through it into a darkened room. He shut the door and leaned against it, listening. Campbell’s voice came through as a low, urgent murmur, joined by the soft tread of his feet as he walked past.

  Danyl waited for his heart-rate to slow, then turned around.

  He stood in one of the bedrooms: the light-spill from under the door revealed a long, narrow space. A dozen black wizard robes labelled with elvish runes hung from hooks. A dozen single beds were spaced evenly all the way to the far door. An SSS cultist slumbered in each bed.

  Keep calm. The cultists were asleep. Campbell would leave. It would be OK. Danyl waited, listened: Campbell’s footsteps grew fainter. He sighed with relief and put his hand on the handle, turning it very slowly.

  The footsteps returned. They stopped directly outside the door.

  Danyl froze. He stopped breathing; Campbell was still talking, presumably into his phone, a fierce urgency in his voice. Danyl pressed his ear against the door. Perhaps this situation would work to his advantage. Perhaps he could overhear the Campbell Walker as he schemed and plotted, unaware that his enemy had penetrated the heart of his stupid tower. He strained to make out the muttered, frantic words, then jumped and stumbled backwards when Campbell screamed, ‘What? That is unacceptable!’

  The cultist sleeping in the nearest bed mumbled, frowned; his eyes fluttered. Keep calm. Keep calm. Danyl headed for the archway at the far end of the room. He picked his way between the reeking beds. The floor was littered with debris: empty cans, clothes, DVDs. He stepped on something plastic and it broke beneath his foot with a subdued crack. The cultists shifted restlessly.

  The terrain was too treacherous to walk on. He got down on his hands and knees and shuffled across the carpet of unwashed underwear. He put his hand in something soft, cold, organic, and managed not to scream. It was a discarded pizza. He wiped it off on the hem of a nearby robe and crawled past the last bed and through the archway.

  He was in another bedroom: another dozen cultists lay snoring on cots above another floorscape of soiled clothes and soda cans. Oh, this had been a mistake. He could have been home by now, eating corn.

  He slithered towards the curtain at the end of the room. A chink of light shone through the parting. He reached it and peeked through. A kitchen. Empty. Finally.

  But opening the curtain would admit too much light int
o the room. He couldn’t risk it. So he got down on his belly, pulled the curtain over his head and wriggled beneath it, terrified that a hue and cry would ring out behind him, that hands would grasp his legs and drag him back into the sweat-scented darkness.

  But he made it. He cleared the curtain, pushed himself up on his elbows and looked around. The kitchen was filthy, of course. Dishes covered with a rich, luminous film of mould sat piled halfway to the ceiling. Scraps of food lay scattered across the floor. A large rat with sleek white fur and luminous pink eyes ate an apple core a metre from Danyl’s face. He whispered, ‘Shoo.’ The rat looked at him, hissed and went back to its dinner.

  Danyl climbed to his feet, using the kitchen table as leverage, and looked at his reflection in the window. He had congealed egg-yolk smeared on the front of his robe, but from a distance it looked like an occult rune. It gave him an air of mystique. He nodded, satisfied, adjusted his cowl and looked around.

  The kitchen table was covered with books, mostly dog-eared fantasy and science fiction (lots of Heinlein) but also some occult tomes: Dion Fortune, Crowley, Gurdjieff. And, Danyl noted, reference works on ancient Egyptian spirituality. One of them was titled Saqqara Mastabas. The name sounded familiar, somehow. He picked it up but this disturbed another book, which toppled off the table on to the floor, and this alarmed the rat, which leaped onto the bench, upsetting a glass before vanishing into the piles of dirty dishes, where it no doubt enjoyed a comfortable nest.

  The upset glass—tall and foaming with blue spores—wobbled on the edge of the bench for a few seconds while Danyl made faces at it, then fell and shattered on the floor. Behind him, through the curtain, came the sounds of beds creaking and confused voices.

  He hurried to the door at the end of the room. It opened onto the laundry, which seemed empty. He slipped through and eased it shut behind him.

  The air in here was musty and close: piles of damp sheets and towels sat stacked to shoulder height. There were two doors in opposite walls. One led back to the hall, the other—if Danyl’s memory was correct—led to the second stairway.