Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  ‘You have nothing to share.’ She stepped closer to the box.

  ‘You’re wrong.’ Danyl pointed at it, tipped sideways in the dust. ‘The letter inside your box contains clues leading to the Priest’s Soul. But, like I told you yesterday, there’s a second letter. More clues. Just let me read your letter and I’ll tell you what’s in mine. Do we have a deal?’

  Stasia considered this. ‘Here is deal,’ she replied. ‘I take back box. You do not read my letter. Then I beat you until you tell me contents of your letter.’

  She took the final step to the box. Danyl pleaded, ‘Don’t touch it.’ She sneered and picked it up and opened it, and her expression turned from triumph to rage.

  She turned the box towards him. It was empty. She snarled, ‘Where is letter?’

  Danyl grinned with pride at a plan perfectly executed. ‘Letter is with Steve. You’ve been tricked, Anna. Steve took it with him and left your jewellery box behind, and in the time you’ve wasted chasing me he’s read it. He knows everything I know, and he’s an expert on the history of the Aro Valley. He’ll piece together the final clues and find the Priest’s Soul, and when he does he’ll move it to a new hiding place. Even I don’t know where he’s going. So beat me if you will, but you’ll learn nothing. And you can drop the fake accent, by the way.’

  ‘Fake accent is how I talk now.’ Stasia threw the box to the ground and said with a cruel smirk, ‘And so I beat you anyway. Then I find your bald friend and repeat process.’

  ‘I don’t think so. No one knows this valley better than Steve. He’ll vanish. You’ll never see him again. He’s a ghost, a—’

  A crashing of branches and rustle of leaves interrupted Danyl’s speech and diverted their attention to the hedge at the edge of the park. A figure broke through the foliage. It was Steve. He clutched his hand to his head: his hair was matted with blood. Danyl and Stasia watched as he peered back out through the hedge, then crouched down and crept along behind it, oblivious to their presence.

  Stasia said, without turning, ‘Please. Finish sentence. Your friend is ghost?’

  ‘I told him to run the other way,’ Danyl sighed. He shouted, ‘Steve!’

  Steve turned. He saw Danyl and then Stasia. His mouth dropped open and he fell backwards into the hedge. He then clawed his way through it in reverse. Stasia cleared the distance to the edge of the park in two bounds and vanished through the greenery.

  Danyl stood and brushed the dust from his knees and looked about. A group of students sat beneath the shade of a tree a few metres from him, their textbooks scattered on the grass. They stared in Danyl in wary astonishment. One of them said, ‘Hey, comrade. Was she, like, your girlfriend?’

  ‘Not really. I did have a thing for her, but that’s over.’

  ‘She’s hot.’

  ‘Oh, sure. But she’s terrible in bed.’ He reached into his overalls and produced the secret letter. ‘And not very smart.’

  Then a howl of pain rang out in the distance. Danyl’s grin vanished. He flinched, his eyes went wide and he stumbled down the path towards his home.

  36

  The Secret of the Priest’s Soul

  September 12, 1914

  Dear Jack

  I trust this letter finds you well and I hope you like the picture. It is not a very good one. I will try to send another.

  I expect it is summer where you are but here it is winter. I’m sitting by the fire watching the wind blow the fallen leaves along the street.

  Our treasure is here with me now. We keep it hidden from sight, safe from all who would harm it. It gives our lives meaning, and its power and knowledge enrich us in ways I cannot describe. You are always in my thoughts.

  All my love,

  Anna

  Danyl sat on the steps to his back door, drinking green tea. He had changed out of his ripped, tattered overalls back into a T-shirt and Verity’s kimono, from which he had scrubbed off the worst of the dirt from the well. The sunlight warmed his bare knees.

  He turned the letter over and inspected the photograph. It showed Anna Gold standing in the temple of Hermes. He saw her resemblance to Stasia now that he knew to look for it. He studied the image closely, just in case it yielded any more clues. Nothing. He laid it on the step beside him.

  His garden was a wasteland of mud and rubble. Campbell and the SSS had excavated his entire yard, leaving only a small path around the gaping pit in the centre of which sat the septic tank. It didn’t smell too bad, actually—just a damp, rainforest scent. Shovels and spades lay scattered about the area, along with dozens of discarded black wizard robes which sat in sad little mud-stained piles where the SSS initiates had cast them during their mutiny.

  Danyl smiled. Poor Campbell.

  He read the letter again. It all made sense now. Stasia and the SSS looked for an old house, and the room in the house where the author wrote her letter: sitting by the fire, watching the wind blow the fallen leaves across the street. They thought the treasure was there, hidden from sight. But, Danyl knew, the treasure was underground—although not literally under the ground—and, more importantly, it was not what any of them thought it was.

  Both letters contained clues, yes. But the most important clue of all was what they did not contain.

  There was a rustle in the trees on the far side of the pit. Steve entered the yard, followed by Stasia, still holding her broken table leg. Steve walked with a stumbling, flinching gait, glancing behind him as though in constant terror of being hit by Stasia which, judging by the many superficial wounds covering his face and arms, was a reasonable fear. Stasia moved with her usual loping stride. A timber wolf among poodles.

  Steve saw Danyl and hurried towards him. ‘She knows everything. She tortured me.’ He pointed to his arms. ‘Look what she did.’

  Stasia strolled around the pit, twirling the broken table leg like a baton. She stood before Danyl and planted it in the mud. ‘There was no need for torture. I chase him into flower garden.’ She flicked her eyes at Steve. ‘He try to hide behind rose bush, impale himself on thorns. I free him in exchange for information.’

  ‘And he led you here.’

  ‘He say you know where Priest’s Soul is hidden.’ She glanced back at the gaping pit in the garden. ‘Was it here?’

  ‘No. That’s where Campbell thought it was.’

  ‘He searched and did not find?’

  ‘He did not find.’

  She pointed the table leg at Danyl. ‘You will take me to Priest’s Soul. Now. If this is trick I dislocate your jaw.’

  ‘Very well. But I should warn you, the Priest’s Soul is not what you think it is.’

  ‘Enough talk. We go.’

  ‘Fine.’ Danyl poured the dregs of his tea on the ground and stood, gesturing for her to follow him into his kitchen. ‘This way.’

  ‘Good.’ Stasia pointed her club at Steve. ‘Sit.’ Steve obeyed. Danyl glanced back at him, and Steve gave him a covert thumbs-up. Danyl nodded in reply.

  He led Stasia through the kitchen and down the hall to the closet. The door to the room-between-rooms was open. Danyl bade her enter and followed her through. She sniffed suspiciously at the bare, windowless space. ‘What is this? A trap?’

  ‘That’s right, witch.’ Campbell Walker stepped out from behind the door.

  Stasia hissed and raised her club. Danyl stepped between them. ‘Stop. I didn’t bring you both here to fight.’

  ‘You bring me to see Priest’s Soul. This is empty room.’

  ‘That’s right. Explain yourself, traitor.’

  ‘This is no ordinary room,’ Danyl replied. ‘This—’ He took a pen torch from the pocket of his kimono and shone it over the worn wooden walls, the bare floor, the low ceiling. ‘This is what we’ve been looking for. This is the Priest’s Soul.’

  There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Stasi
a hit him with the table leg. ‘Where? Where is Priest’s Soul? Talk!’

  ‘Ow. Stop that. I’m trying to tell you.’

  ‘Speak now.’

  ‘Hit him again, witch. Make him beg.’

  ‘Silence, Walker.’

  ‘How dare you talk back to me?’

  Danyl picked himself up off the floor. ‘Hush,’ he urged. ‘Just listen to me for one minute.’

  ‘Why should we heed your lies?’

  ‘You just told me to talk.’

  Stasia considered this. ‘Very well. Speak.’

  Danyl addressed them both. ‘For the last few days we’ve fought and tricked and robbed and betrayed each other in our quest to find the Priest’s Soul. But what is this thing we seek? What do we really know of it? Pearl Clements told me of a Priest’s Soul hidden in the valley. Her father knocked on the walls of local houses, trying to find it.’ He pointed at Campbell. ‘You heard about it from Stasia, who claimed that her starets or so-called wise man told her of the Priest’s Soul. But this wise man was merely Parsons the Satanist, who heard it from Pearl’s father as he lay dying. There’s no actual proof the Priest’s Soul even exists. Just vague rumours.’

  ‘But it’s mentioned in both the letters,’ Campbell protested. ‘Anna Gold was Deputy High Hierophant of her Order. She wrote of a treasure. Knowledge. Power.’

  ‘Neither of the letters explicitly mention the Priest’s Soul,’ Danyl replied. ‘We know there’s something of that name rumoured to be hidden in the valley, and we read the letters and assume that the treasure and the Priest’s Soul are the same thing. But they aren’t.

  ‘Consider this. Wolfgang Bludkraft arrived in the valley in 1914. He founded his Order and began construction of his temple. Photographs show him standing outside this very house, where Anna Gold lived almost a hundred years ago. Then war broke out. The police rounded up foreign nationals from Austria and Germany, and imprisoned them in internment camps. But they never found Wolfgang Bludkraft, who simply disappeared. Where did he go?’

  ‘No one is knowing this.’

  ‘I is knowing this. Bludkraft’s disciples built places for him to hide when the government’s agents came looking. Rooms like this.’ Danyl knocked on the bare wooden wall. ‘They based them on the secret rooms built by Catholic families in early Protestant England, a time when harbouring a Catholic priest was punishable by death. You know what they called these rooms?’ He knocked again. ‘Priest holes.’

  Silence. Campbell and Stasia absorbed this information. Danyl set his torch on the floor, pointing up. The light threw their shadows together in overlapping bands.

  Campbell spoke first. ‘Are you saying,’ he said hopefully, ‘that the Priest’s Soul was hidden in this priest hole? And now it’s somewhere else in the valley?’

  ‘I’m saying there is no Priest’s Soul. It’s a mistake, a trick of language. There’s only this priest hole. Maybe Pearl’s father misheard Bludkraft when he spied on the Order at the well, all those years ago. Or maybe Pearl and Parsons misunderstood him. We’ll probably never know. ’

  ‘Maybe this is so,’ said Stasia. ‘Maybe not. Both letters speak of treasure. Knowledge. Power. Maybe we have name of treasure wrong. Tiny mistake. Big deal. Where is treasure?’

  Campbell slouched against the wall and slid onto the floor. ‘No, it all makes sense,’ he said wretchedly, his head in his hands. ‘Wolfgang Bludkraft was their treasure. He was the head of their Order, their source of knowledge and power. He gave their lives meaning.’

  ‘Why call him treasure? Why not say his name in letters?’

  ‘Because he was a fugitive. The letters might have been intercepted by the authorities.’

  Campbell started to cry. Stasia was defiant. ‘This room above ground. Second letter say treasure was underground.’

  ‘It was. Anna Gold was part of a clandestine conspiracy to conceal Bludkraft from the government. In other words, an underground. That’s why the Order of Thrice-Wise Hermes died out during the war—or seemed to. It became a secret organisation engaged in treasonous activity. They met in secret at the well above Epuni Street and conducted their rituals in the nearby temple.

  ‘We can only speculate on what happened then. Bludkraft was an old man when he arrived in the valley. Eventually he died and the Order drifted apart. People moved on with their lives. Everyone forgot about him until five years ago, when Sutcliffe Parsons stumbled upon the ruined temple. He learned about Bludkraft and spoke to Pearl Clements and her dying father, who told him there was something called a “Priest’s Soul” hidden in the valley somewhere. But Parsons made a fatal mistake. He befriended the artist Sylvia Gold, who lived in a campervan near the ruined temple, and he seduced her young granddaughter, who was beguiled by his promise of a mystical treasure hidden in the valley—’

  ‘Silence.’ Stasia stepped towards him. ‘You have said enough.’

  ‘I don’t know exactly what happened when Parsons was arrested,’ Danyl continued, his eyes glittering in the torchlight. ‘Perhaps the young girl, still obsessed with the dream of finding the Priest’s Soul, stole a letter from Parsons before he could safeguard his archives. She thought this letter contained clues leading to the Priest’s Soul. She didn’t realise this was a doomed, foolish quest, that the thing she chased was an empty room.’

  ‘You lie. I steal nothing from Parsons,’ Stasia’s expression was a study in controlled fury. ‘You think you have answers. Maybe you are correct. Maybe there is no Priest’s Soul. No treasure. No hope. Just three fools standing in empty room.’

  ‘It’s true!’ Campbell wailed, slumped on the floor with his head between his knees.

  ‘If this is true,’ Stasia continued, ‘then all is lost. If the Priest’s Soul is not real then the world has lost more than selfish, stupid little creatures such as yourselves can ever imagine. I will go now. I must meditate on these things, and I will waste no more time on you two. But first—’ She stepped in front of Danyl, the torchlight illuminating her red silk robe, her face glowing and demonic, her eyes pools of shadow. ‘I deal with you. Liar. Deceiver. Seducer. I take back my gift.’

  Stasia held out her arm, her hand outstretched in the shape of a claw, and cried, her voice booming in the confined space, ‘I revoke the power of my healing. I leave you as I found you, a pathetic, crippled broken thing.’ She released her hand and cried out an inarticulate curse, and she stared at Danyl, her eyes ablaze with wrath.

  Danyl smiled sadly. ‘Stasia,’ he said, holding out his hand in a gesture of friendship, ‘it’s over. There’s no Priest’s Soul. Which means there’s no gift. You’re not a healer. You never were. Can’t we—’ He broke off; frowned, puzzled: Stasia smirked. Danyl’s eyes widened. He stumbled and stared at her, an expression of comprehending dread on his face. ‘My ankle!’ He clutched at her as he fell to his knees. Stasia laughed, and he grabbed his leg and screamed and toppled over onto his side.

  She dropped her club. It fell to the floor in front of his face, and he watched her bare feet recede across the bare wooden floorboards and through the closet door which swung shut behind her, leaving Danyl and Campbell alone together in the half-lit gloom of the priest hole.

  37

  Patterns in the void

  Silence.

  The torchlight threw the shadows of the two prone men across the walls. Eventually one shadow reached out and grasped the shoulder of the other, and it spoke. ‘How ironic that it should come to this. The two of us, together, in this very same room. Again.’

  The other shadow did not respond.

  The first shadow glanced around the long, narrow, empty space and said, ‘So there is no Priest’s Soul. But where is the other artefact?’

  The second shadow lifted its head. ‘What artefact?’

  ‘The archive. Your novel. The one I tried to burn?’

  Danyl shifted. He said, ‘It’s . .
. around.’

  ‘It’s safe, I hope. No one else must read it.’

  Danyl did not reply immediately. He tried to sort his thoughts, put recent events out of his mind for a moment. He had wanted to have this conversation with Campbell for an entire year. Now the dread secret of the DoorWay project was within his grasp.

  He propped himself up on his elbows facing Campbell and asked, ‘Why do you still care about that book? What happened when you took that drug? What did you see?’

  ‘You know the answer as well as I. Better.’

  ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Very well,’ Campbell sighed. ‘Continue your pretence. I saw the same things you saw.’ He shook his head, stared off into the darkness. ‘When we first began my great work I suggested that we name the compound DoorWay because I thought it would open the door to a new stage in human development. How he must have laughed at me .’

  ‘Suggested it to who?’ Danyl was getting annoyed. He clenched his teeth and said, a little too politely, ‘Who must have laughed at you?’

  ‘Your master, of course. The biochemist. The man who paid you to betray me.’

  ‘I didn’t betray you. Campbell, listen.’ Danyl tried to modulate his tone, get the sincerity levels right. He wasn’t used to telling people the truth: it sounded clumsy and forced. ‘No one paid me. I never met the biochemist. I never took the DoorWay drug.’

  ‘You’re a poor liar, writer. You took the drug and I have evidence.’

  ‘What evidence?’

  ‘Your writing, writer. When I took the drug that night I passed through the DoorWay and saw what lay beyond it. Just as you once did, when your master administered the drug to you. I saw the dark places. The great passageways, which are not just a place but a thing that can use DoorWay to enter into our world.’ He snorted. ‘At first I thought it was just a hallucination. A horrible dream, that it would be enough merely to destroy the drug and prevent its manufacture. But then I read the notes I found in your satchel, the ending to your novel. The ending which revealed that you, too, took the drug.’