Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  ‘But I didn’t.’

  ‘That’s when I realised: your whole book was a code, a description of what we both saw when we passed through. Oh, it’s hidden, of course—wrapped up in metaphors, symbols. You’re far cleverer than I gave you credit for. And I also realised that if we both took the same drug and saw the same thing, then what we saw had to be real. Then I understood the true purpose of your book: it was another DoorWay, a conduit for what lay beyond: a way to infect the mind of the reader. That’s why I formed the SSS. That’s why I sought the Priest’s Soul—to counter your evil plan and protect humanity.’

  Danyl paused for a minute, considering Campbell’s words. Then he replied, ‘You are so incredibly crazy.’

  ‘Do I look crazy?’ Campbell tossed his head, his red, tear-rimmed eyes gleaming beneath the cowl of his robe. ‘Do I sound crazy, when I charge that you wrote that book after taking the DoorWay drug, and that you and your master plot to publish it and so contaminate the minds of as many people as possible, and allow a nameless being to enter into them and poison our world? You might think you know what you’re doing, but you’re both pawns! Slaves to the unfathomable Thing that lurks beyond DoorWay.’

  ‘When you put it like that it all makes a lot of sense. But here’s the thing. There is no Thing. I didn’t take your drug. I would never have risked it. Half of the rats you tested DoorWay on died.’

  ‘Lies,’ Campbell shot back. ‘The ending of your book makes it clear that you were exposed to the drug.’

  ‘But I made that up. I made all of it up. Nothing in the book has any connection to reality.’

  ‘But the ideas in there. The themes. The symbolism. Where did these come from if not the place beyond DoorWay?’

  ‘They came from me. My imagination. My powers as an artist. Listen, Campbell.’ Danyl seized his hand. ‘You took that drug and saw something horrible, and you saw similarities to it in my book and connected the two in your mind. But the links you saw were just random coincidences. What you saw wasn’t real. It couldn’t have been, because I never cared about DoorWay. I thought it was all a big joke. I never believed in you. You have to believe me.’

  Campbell stared at him, a look of disbelief on his face. ‘You thought it was a joke?’ he whispered. ‘The things I saw, the passageways, the conduit. None of it was real?’

  ‘No.’

  He let out a deep sigh. ‘It was just a hallucination then. A horrible nightmare that followed me into the waking world. But why would the biochemist create such a diabolical thing? And who helped him? Who betrayed me?’ He sighed again and flicked his hand, batting the questions aside. ‘I suppose we’ll never know. Perhaps that’s for the best.’

  Danyl said, ‘The truth can be a terrible thing, but it’s better than chasing a delusion. DoorWay isn’t real. Neither is the Priest’s Soul.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘We’ve got to learn to live in the real world, you and I. Not in our fantasies.’

  Campbell nodded, adjusting to his new world view. ‘Yes,’ he decided. ‘You’re right. Delusion is an evil thing. The truth is what’s important.’ He clapped Danyl on the shoulder and stood, saying, ‘This has been a harsh lesson for both of us. Now I’ll call you an ambulance. Your ankle needs medical attention.’

  ‘Actually . . .’ Danyl rolled onto his knees. ‘My ankle is fine.’

  ‘But Stasia took back her gift. You fell.’

  ‘I faked it. If there’s no Priest’s Soul then there’s no mystical gift. And if she can’t give me her gift she can’t revoke it.’

  ‘Oh.’ Campbell blinked. ‘Why trick her?’

  ‘I wanted her to feel better about things. She’d had a big shock. Also, I didn’t want her to hit me with that table leg again.’

  Danyl stood and held the door open, and they left the room-between-rooms. They filed into the kitchen. Campbell surveyed the gutted ceiling above him and grunted with what sounded like satisfaction. He said, ‘I first met Stasia that night, you know.’

  ‘What night?’

  ‘The night I ran from this very room, sobbing, fleeing into the darkness. I’d failed to destroy your archive. I thought the only thing left for me was oblivion. Instead I found Stasia—or, rather, she found me. She was waiting for me on the path. She laid her hands upon my brow and cast out the shadows. She told me of the Priest’s Soul and gave me something to live for. She transformed my life. But if the Priest’s Soul was a lie then how did she heal me?’

  ‘You healed yourself.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right.’ Campbell shrugged. ‘But I believed in her. I followed her guidance. I formed the SSS and made her High Hierophant. Under her direction we ransacked dozens of houses in the search for the Priest’s Soul. But we found nothing. And finally, four days ago, I defied her and refused to break into any more homes. The Campbell Walker is many things. A dreamer. A romantic. A genius. But he is not a common criminal.’

  ‘But the day after that you pillaged my house.’

  ‘Yes. And rightly so. When I disobeyed her commands Stasia revoked her gift. I believed devoutly in the existence of the Priest’s Soul and in her powers, and I plunged back into darkness. I returned to the same place she first ensnared me—the clearing in the path—and I lay down and wept. That’s when you found me. You tried to comfort me, muttered some banal absurdities and then left, leaving your backpack behind. I opened it intending to scatter your belongings to the wind. Imagine my surprise when I found the photo album filled with pictures of the Order of Thrice-Wise Hermes and their temple. More clues to the location of the Priest’s Soul.’ Campbell sighed again. ‘You know the rest. My raid on your house. Your retaliatory attack on my tower. And it was all for nothing. The Priest’s Soul is an empty room. A fragment of disinformation.’

  Campbell walked to the door, he turned and waved. ‘Goodbye, writer, and thank you. Good luck in your quest for answers. And good luck with your book. I forsake my vow to destroy you. You may publish it with my blessing, on the proviso that you rename my character or I’ll sue you.’ Then he vanished into the sunlight.

  Danyl breathed out. He stood for a moment in the midday silence, cherishing the calm. Then he turned to the closed doors of the kitchen pantry and said, ‘You can come out now.’

  ‘Actually I can’t,’ the pantry replied. ‘There aren’t any door handles on the inside.’

  Danyl crossed the room and opened the pantry. Steve stood inside it, licking honey from his fingers, an empty honey jar at his feet. In his left hand he held a small cardboard box. He held it up and grinned with puzzled pride. ‘I found it, but what is it?’

  Danyl peered inside it. ‘It’s a map,’ he replied. ‘A map to the Priest’s Soul.’

  39

  The Real Secret of the Priest’s Soul

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Danyl sat at the table opposite Steve. He was lost in thought. One of Campbell’s questions in the priest hole haunted him: Where did the ideas in your book come from? They came from me, he reminded himself. I’m an artist. He smiled at Steve and said, ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ then tore open a packet of rubber dishwashing gloves and slipped them on. He pulled Steve’s box across the table and picked through it. ‘Did you get everything?’

  ‘Everything I could find.’

  ‘Any problems?’

  ‘What’s a problem?’

  Danyl’s plan was brilliant. Flawless. And it had actually worked! He had drawn Campbell and Stasia to his house and distracted them with his shocking revelations about the nonexistence of the Priest’s Soul while Steve crept past the deserted EZ Wellness heal U Centre, through the gate in the garden wall and down the secret path to the courtyard behind Campbell’s now abandoned tower. Then he entered the dark recesses of the basement and opened the darkened cage containing Sylvia Gold’s ancient campervan.

  Danyl tossed a pair of gloves to Steve, who put them on and frowned at the contents of
the box and said, ‘I still don’t understand. What are these things?’

  Danyl tipped the box onto the table and a pile of glass shards poured out. They were black on one side, covered in bright, broken fragments of line and colour on the reverse. ‘These are the childhood memories of Stasia’s grandmother, Sylvia Gold, painted onto the inside of the windows of her old campervan. Help me out here. Fit them together. Quick—we don’t have much time.’

  Steve picked up a piece of glass and examined it. ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘Answers. Sylvia Gold’s parents knew Wolfgang Bludkraft,’ Danyl explained. ‘They were members of his Order. They helped build his temple. They may have known where the Priest’s Soul was hidden. And Gold may have left clues in her painting leading to it.’

  Steve shut his eyes to think. ‘Didn’t we just establish that the Priest’s Soul doesn’t exist?’

  ‘It doesn’t. Technically.’

  ‘Right.’ Steve smiled. Then frowned. ‘So why are we looking for clues leading to it?’

  Danyl inspected the pieces of glass as he spoke, moving them around on the table. ‘Because when Bludkraft fled Vienna he took nothing with him except a box. Rival occult groups said he’d stolen something of incredible value, and Gold’s painting of him at the old well shows him holding a mysterious chest. And consider this. He arrived here a total unknown, but within a matter of months he built up a secret religious order who built a temple for him and betrayed their own country to keep him safe. He bought something to this valley with him, and it may still be here.’

  ‘But we found the priest hole,’ Steve waved towards the hall. ‘And it’s empty. Where else do we look?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out. Remember Pearl Clements?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The old woman we chased around her garden.’

  Steve shook his head.

  ‘You attacked her. She gave you scones.’

  ‘Oh, her. Yes.’

  ‘She told us her father tapped on the walls of houses around the valley looking for the Priest’s Soul. Now we know she misheard, and he was actually looking for a priest hole. But wouldn’t he have known that the priest hole was hidden in this house? He lived here with his brother, and Anna Gold, after all. So why was he looking in other houses around the valley?’

  ‘Ah! Because there’s more than one priest hole.’

  ‘Exactly. There’s another, as-yet-undiscovered priest hole, and hidden inside it is Bludkraft’s treasure which, since we don’t actually know what it is, we may as well refer to as the Priest’s Soul, pending additional information.’

  ‘So there is a Priest’s Soul and it’s hidden inside a priest hole.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Steve accepted this. ‘It is obvious,’ he agreed.

  ‘But we need to hurry. I think Sutcliffe Parsons knows what the Priest’s Soul is. Worse, he knows roughly where it is. The other night he said that his business in the valley was almost concluded. We have to get to it before he does.’

  They sorted through the shattered mound of the dead artist’s childhood memories: headless domestic animals; flowers with no stems; scraps of the sea; particles of sky. Danyl matched together two pieces of glass showing a disembodied building with the letters ‘CHER’ on one and ‘BUT’ on another. These fitted into other fragments, which combined to form a mosaic showing prewar Aro Street. Slowly, painstaking piece by painstaking piece, the entire valley spread across the table. Groups of tiny, perfectly rendered children played games in the park; teams of builders swarmed over the half-completed houses on the upper slopes of the hills. In a tiny grove atop Epuni Street, a group gathered around a stone well: a miniature draft of the oil canvas in Verity’s gallery.

  They picked out more fragments: shards from another window, depicting the west of the valley: the colours here were darker, more ominous. Two pieces joined together to form a street sign: ‘HOLLOW’ and ‘WAY’.

  ‘Look for any pieces with words on it,’ said Danyl. ‘Words and fire.’

  They picked through the remnants of the pile and soon assembled a black house at the far end of Holloway Road. The house was aflame: a column of smoke climbed into the sky. Four figures lay inside the house; a fifth stood in a chamber beneath it. Letters painted on the front wall of the house, in blood-red paint, spelled, ‘NTINE’. The left side of the house was missing.

  Steve frowned at it. ‘What does “ntine mean”? Byzantine? Valentine? Serpentine?’

  Danyl picked up the overalls he had worn during his seduction of Stasia. They were badly torn, with bloody patches on the chest. He felt around inside the pockets and produced the piece of glass and fitted it into the burning house. It left a tiny gap at the beginning.

  Steve picked the last piece from the pile and filled it in. The word on the house read, ‘QUARANTINE.’

  40

  Return to Holloway Road

  Danyl stood outside Verity’s new house, watching her through the window. She sat on a faded orange couch, sobbing, her face red. The early afternoon air hummed with birds, insects, distant cars, but beneath it all he could hear, faint but persistent, the sound of her crying.

  What had gone wrong between them? Oh, specifically, Danyl drove her away, then begged her to take him back, rewon her heart and then abandoned her without a word of explanation—but the real wounds in their relationship were deeper, harder to articulate, the blame less easy to apportion.

  They’d been happy once. Those carefree months of courtship in Campbell’s damp, frozen concrete tower had been the best times. The period immediately after moving in together was pretty good, although Danyl’s deterioration—the writer’s block, the depression, the sleeping—had set in quickly. Then followed months of escalating hostility: diplomatic incidents, accusations, betrayals, reprisals and counter-reprisals, followed by a low-grade civil war, until finally, one day she said. . .

  ‘I’m leaving you.’

  Danyl rolled over and sat up. Verity stood in the doorway, a suitcase at her feet. The blinds in the bedroom were closed: they glowed with backlit sunlight.

  Danyl said, ‘Oh.’ He absorbed Verity’s words. ‘That’s terrible.’ He thought some more. ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t do this any more.’

  ‘Not do what, specifically?’

  ‘You’re sick, Danyl.’ He could see she’d been crying.

  ‘Sick? I’m in the prime of health.’

  ‘You’re clinically depressed. You sleep for twenty hours a day.’

  ‘I’m conserving my powers.’

  ‘I’ve tried to help you.’ Verity’s jaw trembled. ‘And all of this is my fault. I created this situation and I’m just making things worse by staying. You need to learn to take care of yourself again. To stand on your own feet.’

  ‘Verity, hush. You’re talking nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with me.’

  ‘Nothing wrong?’ Her voice cracked. ‘You didn’t even notice I was leaving you. I’ve had movers downstairs for an hour shifting my things into their truck. Didn’t you hear them? Weren’t you curious about what was going on? Didn’t you wonder why I was in here packing up all my clothes?’

  He had wondered about that: the voices of the movers yelling at each other had interrupted his dozing. He had also wondered who Verity had talked to on the phone last night, a low, whispered conversation, lasting hours. He replied, ‘You’re always doing something. I didn’t know it was this. If I did I’d have got up.’

  ‘Now you do know and you’re still in bed.’

  ‘Well, my feet are all tangled in the sheets. No! Verity! Wait! Don’t leave!’

  She stopped and turned, and waited expectantly.

  ‘I don’t have anything to say,’ Danyl admitted. ‘I didn’t think you’d stop.’

  ‘There is one more thing.’

  ‘What?
’ Danyl kicked ineffectually at the bedsheets.

  ‘The movers took your archive by mistake. The box with your book. It’s at my new house. You’ll have to come by and move it back.’

  ‘Keep it. It’s useless to me.’

  ‘You need it. You have to start writing again.’ She crossed over to the bed and kissed his forehead. ‘I’ll leave it out on the porch for you. I’m at number sixteen Holloway Road. Write that down or you’ll forget it.’

  Danyl picked up his dream journal from the bedside table. He wrote ‘16’ on a blank page and tore it out. Verity stroked his head and leaned forward to kiss him . . .

  Someone clapped Danyl on the shoulder. He flinched.

  ‘Hey, buddy.’

  Steve wore knee-high rubber boots, clear perspex safety glasses and a miner’s torch strapped to his forehead. He carried a pickaxe over his shoulder and wore a backpack bursting at the seams. ‘I’m ready.’ He tapped his torch and beamed. ‘It’s going to be a great day for academic psychology.’

  Danyl did not reply. He returned his attention to Verity. He felt sick about the way he had treated her. He had told Verity he loved her; had talked his way back into her life, her heart—and then had walked out again without a second thought to pursue the Priest’s Soul.

  Steve nudged him. ‘Time to move on. We need to stay ahead of Sutcliffe Parsons, right? This way.’ He pointed, indicating their course: the way was steep, the street narrowed and darkened.

  Danyl did not move. Steve continued to jostle him. ‘C’mon, buddy. Time is a crucial factor here. So no more distractions, no more— Hey, is that Verity?’

  ‘It’s Verity.’

  ‘Why is she crying?’

  ‘Because of me.’

  ‘What should we do?’

  ‘We do nothing.’ Danyl started walking towards the house. ‘I’m going to make this right.’