Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

‘She’s a little shorter than me. Thin. With dark hair, I don’t know how she cuts it now, I haven’t seen her for six months. Her name is Verity. She was talking on a phone when she walked out. You must know who I’m talking about.’

  But the old man behind the soup counter shook his head again. ‘I cannot help you, sir.’

  ‘Sure you can.’ Danyl reached into his pocket and peeled a note from the roll of cash he’d stolen from Eleanor’s restaurant. He dropped it in the tip jar and leaned across the counter. ‘Just tell me which way she went. Nod your head in that direction.’

  ‘I cannot disclose anything. Sufi Soup places great importance on the privacy of its customers.’

  ‘Ha!’ Danyl pounced. ‘So she was your customer! She was here. You admit it!’

  ‘All of humanity is my customer.’

  ‘Oh.’ Danyl drummed his fingers on the counter, frustrated, trying to think of a way to outwit the wise and ancient soup cook. Nothing came to him, so he began to plead. ‘Please, old man. I need your help. I need to find my girlfriend. Technically my ex-girlfriend. We might get back together. Anyway, she was here, earlier, and I need to find her. I think she’s about to make a terrible mistake.’

  ‘What kind of mistake?’

  ‘I’m not sure, exactly. She said something about going beyond existence. Have you seen her?’

  The old man was about to help. Danyl could see it in his eyes; they brimmed with compassion. But then they glanced sideways at the tip jar. The note Danyl had dropped inside it lay curled against the glass. Something about it seemed to displease the soup cook. His eyes turned cold, and he said curtly, ‘I’m sorry. All I can offer you is soup.’

  ‘Soup? Soup? What about your faith?’ Danyl demanded, waving his hand at the painting of Rumi. ‘Doesn’t it command you to help the needy in their moment of need?’

  ‘My faith is about obedience to God,’ the old man replied. ‘The prophets and sages are silent on whether I should help you find your girlfriend. But my common sense tells me to stay silent. You say you want to help her, but what if you intend her harm?’

  ‘And so you don’t get involved, just because you don’t know what’s going on? What kind of common sense is that? What if your silence leads to tragedy?’

  ‘Silence is an ocean,’ the old man answered. The bright yellow light mounted above the counter bathed him in an otherworldly glow. ‘When the ocean seeks, do not flee into the river of words.’

  It was raining again. Danyl stood outside the soup kitchen trying to parse the old man’s cryptic aphorism. What did it mean? Nothing, he suspected. But perhaps it was wisdom, and Danyl simply wasn’t wise enough to understand it. That was the problem with wisdom. It was only apparent to those who already had it. If you were ignorant and you really needed wisdom, it was useless to you.

  He put the old man out of his mind, and looked up and down Aro Street. Verity’s message was nine minutes long. She could have walked along the street in either direction. She could have turned off onto Epuni Street, or Devon Street, or walked through the park, or down any number of pathways. Still, there were the chickens. Chickens near a gravel path. And somewhere near the beginning of the message Verity had passed through a gate or doorway and then over running water. That was plenty to go on.

  When he last saw Verity six months ago, she’d fled in a pick-up truck driven—Danyl suspected—by Simon the mysterious chemist. They had gone west into the depths of the valley, so Danyl walked this way now. He kept his phone out and kept an eye on the time, and paced off nine minutes, then added on an extra sixty seconds to account for Verity’s purpose-driven stride. This brought him out of the commercial area of the valley into a residential section of moderate prosperity. Many of the houses had cars parked outside them, and many of those cars had wheels. Danyl crossed from one side of the road to the other trying to identify gates or streams or gravel paths, and listening for chickens over the static of the rain.

  There were a few gates. There were no streams and no chickens. There was gravel, but not enough. Verity walked up her path for at least three minutes, which was a long time to walk on gravel. Most garden paths took five to ten seconds. Her path was unusually long: he would know it when he saw it. It was nowhere in this part of the valley.

  He returned to the soup kitchen and headed in the opposite direction. He detoured through the park. He investigated stairways. His shoes filled with water. He found chickens, eventually: a miserable clutch of fowl croaking beneath a leafless tree. They were confined in the back garden of a house bedecked with crystal wind chimes and daubed with astrological symbols, which the chickens themselves seemed to regard with contempt. Danyl searched this section of the valley for several minutes, peeking over fences and down driveways. There were no gravel paths. No steel gates. The chickens clucked to one another as he prowled about.

  He continued his search. The streets were still empty, untravelled except for an empty bus that rumbled by. Where was everyone? The valley had a post-rapture feeling to it. Danyl surveyed the dark houses, the apartment buildings with their rows of darkened windows. He checked driveways. Down one of them he stumbled across three elderly men having sex on a muddy lawn. So not everyone was missing. Another drive led to a freshly painted, renovated house with an elegant sign beside the door advertising the Church of Real Economics, with a picture of a mushroom cloud beneath it. The sound of chanting came from inside. Interesting, but no sign of Verity and none of the sounds of her passage. He must have missed something.

  He returned to Aro Street and stood under an awning, scanning the buildings. His eyes fell on the entrance to the alleyway where Joy had vanished.

  Danyl hadn’t looked inside the blue envelope yet. He’d been focused on Verity’s message, but he was also a little scared. Everyone who opened a blue envelope vanished. Even Ann. But what if Verity had gone into the alleyway? Would Danyl have to look inside the envelope to follow her?

  He crossed the road. The alley looked the same. Dirty and empty. No sign of Verity. No chickens. He checked the two branches where it forked behind the apartment buildings at the back. Nothing.

  He was about to leave when he glanced down the narrow concrete steps that ran down the side of one of the buildings. At the bottom was a small landing and a door in the wall. The early morning rain had swept a flurry of leaves and rubbish to the bottom of the steps, where someone had opened the door, clearing a precise semicircle in the debris.

  Verity? Possibly. Danyl descended the steps. He tried the handle. Of course, it was locked.

  He consulted his timetable of Verity’s message. A door opened about two minutes after the sound of the mystical music faded. He timed himself as he returned to the soup kitchen.

  It took him exactly two minutes.

  Danyl returned to the alleyway. He stood at the top of the steps and looked around, inspecting the area more carefully than last time. He noticed a sign attached to the wall of the alleyway, faded and weather-beaten into near invisibility. It read:

  Ye Undergrounde Bookshoppe

  Purveyors of Used Books and Finest Quality Darkness

  An arrow on the sign pointed down the steps. Beneath the arrow, all but imperceptible, was an outline of the spiral.

  Danyl took a deep breath and opened the blue envelope.

  15

  Ye Undergrounde Bookshoppe

  A map. That’s all there was inside the envelope. Just a map printed on bright blue paper. An odd map, though. Danyl turned it around, trying to figure out which was the top and the bottom. Half of it showed the valley: Aro Street, the park and other major routes and landmarks were clearly marked. The other half showed … somewhere else. A labyrinth of squares and wide roads. None of the areas on that side of the map were labelled. They weren’t in the valley, Danyl knew, or any part of the Capital. Although the two regions were adjacent to each other there was only one crossover point between them. The steps in the alleyway.

  According to the map there was a hallway beyond the
door, and beyond the hallway a small square room, and after the room, the labyrinth: vast plazas with hundreds of paths connecting them. But Danyl couldn’t get through the door. He held the map close to his face, reading the tiny words beside the steps:

  The First

  Sign:

  You must pay

  to enter the

  Real City

  But

  Your money is worth less than

  ash

  The first part seemed pretty straightforward. Pay to enter the Real City. Which was, presumably, the labyrinth beyond the doorway. Easy. Danyl was a little confused about the last part, but maybe that would become clear. He tucked the map under his arm and faced the door.

  How should he pay? He took the bundle of cash he stole from Eleanor out of his pocket, peeled off a ten-dollar bill, knelt down and slipped it under the base of the door. He listened. A soft scuffling sound came from the other side. There was someone there.

  Danyl waited. The scuffling stopped. Then the ten-dollar bill reappeared. Whoever was behind the door had pushed it back. Why? Wasn’t it enough?

  Danyl looked down at the bill, confused. A wisp of smoke curled up from the crack beneath the door. Danyl blinked. A thin red line of fire crept along the note. He snatched at the money, then howled as the flames flared up and licked at his fingers. He blew on them, trying to save the ten dollars, which was enough money to live on for an entire week if he stole most of his food and found some nice doorways, but it was too late. The bill trembled in a gust of wind then dissolved into ash and drifted away, leaving only a tiny unburned corner between Danyl’s thumb and forefinger.

  He sucked at his scorched digits. Well, that explained the cryptic last line on the map. But it didn’t help him get through the door. He spent a few minutes on his knees, whispering and pleading to the person beyond it. He didn’t expect a reply, and he didn’t get one.

  Danyl sat at the top of the steps and tried to think.

  What was going on? He’d been so busy seeking Verity and fleeing giants and finding maps that he hadn’t stopped to ask that simple but important question.

  People were disappearing. Ann. Her student. Joy. Steve. Verity. Some of them—maybe all of them—had gone through the door at the bottom of the steps, but to get through it you had to solve some kind of riddle. The riddle was the first sign; Joy mentioned others, one of which involved the fine structure constant of the universe. What possible explanation could there be for all of this? How could it make sense? It was hard to imagine, but Danyl was an imaginative guy. A writer. Imagination was his forte.

  He stared into the sunken depths of the stairway and imagined with all his might. His thoughts drifted through empty streets and bitter memories: here was Steve’s deserted house; there were Verity’s unseeable photographs, her cryptic voice message, the spiral scrawled in her notebook. But his mind passed over all of these things lightly; it kept circling back to the soup kitchen, like a little dog tugging at the hem of his trousers. Here, it seemed to say. Something important happened here.

  Danyl was dubious, but he gave his brain the benefit of the doubt and thought about Sufi Soup Emporium. Was it the soup cook? His cryptic aphorisms? The posters on the walls? He inspected them all for meaning and found nothing.

  Although … there was something odd about the cook’s behaviour. He’d been about to help Danyl, but then he glanced at the money in the tip jar and changed his mind. Why?

  Danyl visualised the tip jar. It was empty except for the money he’d tossed in as a failed attempt to bribe the cook. The note had fallen against the side of the jar; the light mounted above the counter shone through the paper, casting the patterns in its design as a shadow against the back wall.

  The shadow of a spiral.

  He dug his hand into his pocket, pulling out the wad of cash he’d stolen from Eleanor’s office. He sorted through the notes. They were all small denomination bills, but two of them looked odd. Discoloured. Inspecting them, he saw there was no value written on these bills: instead of a number, they read ‘n+1’. He held one of them up to the light. It was fake.

  In the middle of the bill, in the place of a face or an animal, was a complex interlocking spiral.

  He slid the spiral dollar beneath the door at the bottom of the steps. The door shuddered, then creaked and swung outward.

  A long, narrow hall was lit by a flickering white light. The light emitted a low hum. The hall ended in another door. The spiral dollar had disappeared, somehow, along with whoever had taken it.

  The hallway was empty except for the far door and a tiny box on the wall beside it. Danyl made his way towards them, all the while expecting the door behind him to slam shut, trapping him. But it did not do this. If Danyl wanted to, he could turn and run away. The freedom to leave unsettled him even more than the door shutting, imprisoning him, would have.

  As he drew closer he saw that the next door had no handle. A tiny scrap of paper taped to the centre of the door read:

  This is a sign.

  Beneath it was a numeric keypad.

  Danyl already knew the code to open the door. It was the number he’d heard Joy muttering as she searched the alleyway. The secret constant, hidden in the deep structure of the universe. Before he tapped in the code, he hesitated. Was he doing the right thing? Did he want to disappear? Most sensible people avoided vanishing. But maybe it wouldn’t be too bad? Maybe it was the best thing for him?

  But when he reached out to tap in the code, his brain gave him a tiny little zap, like a warning. He started, afraid, but then he grew angry. What was he? A dog for his brain to shock whenever it disapproved of him? No, Danyl was a human. A man. A writer. He would go where he wanted, despite what his brain thought or did. He clenched his teeth and punched in the code: 1, 3, 7—the dimensionless number at the heart of existence, and a bell chimed somewhere in the distance. The light overheard went out and the door at the end of the hall slammed shut; the door ahead of him opened.

  16

  Things go really well for a little while

  A squat male figure stood in the doorway; he stood aside and gestured for Danyl to enter the room beyond him. As he turned, his face met the light, revealing youthful pallid features ravaged by acne. It was Ann’s missing student, Sophus the mathematician.

  ‘Greetings, pilgrim,’ Sophus said, bowing slightly.

  ‘Hey, kid.’ Danyl stepped past Sophus and looked around.

  According to the blue envelope, the door at the end of the hall led to a vast labyrinth. The room Danyl found himself in was roughly double the size of a tennis court, but there were no other exits. Three of the walls were lined with empty bookshelves, with the slats of additional disassembled shelves leaning against them. The fourth wall was covered by a dirt-coloured curtain. There was a table beside the curtain and a second man stood at it. He had his back to Danyl. Open on the table before him was a plastic suitcase. Danyl couldn’t see what was inside it.

  The room was illuminated by candles. They were spaced along the shelves at irregular intervals. They lit up a dozen thin foam mattresses arranged in a grid in the centre of the room. Two of the mattresses were occupied—the first by a man dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, the second by a thickly bearded man wearing a red velvet dress. Both of them wore blindfolds. Both of their mouths were stained an odd blue colour. Neither of them moved. Danyl remembered the children’s rhyme. Hide me, blind me, or Gorgon will find me.

  ‘They have already made the crossing,’ Sophus said in a low voice at Danyl’s shoulder. ‘You have many questions. We are here to answer them.’

  And then the man at the far table turned. Danyl felt a shock of recognition. It was the goat-faced man he had met at the Free Market all those months ago and nearly fought with over a second-hand book. The goat-faced man was holding a syringe. Inside it was a bright blue liquid that seemed to glow. Its radiance pierced the gloom of the basement. It was a piece of sky inside a tiny tube.

  ‘Don’t worry
,’ Sophus said, his voice low, reassuring. ‘There’s no needle. We just squirt the correct dose into your mouth. Then you’ll make the crossing to the Real City. This way, pilgrim.’ Sophus tugged on Danyl’s elbow, pulling him towards the mattresses. Danyl let himself be led.

  What should he do? Why was the goat-faced man from the fair here? Why was Ann’s student here? Where was the labyrinth? What was the Real City? Were they the same thing? And if Verity had come here but there wasn’t any exit from this room, where had she gone?

  The Goatman drew nigh with his syringe of glowing blue liquid. Danyl’s brain gave him gentle, insistent shocks, warning him that he was in danger. I know, dammit, he thought back at it.

  ‘Here’s your blindfold,’ Sophus said, applying a gentle pressure to Danyl’s shoulder. ‘It will keep you safe.’

  Danyl either needed to push Sophus away and run for the door, hoping to escape, or to yield: let the goat-faced man squirt glowing liquid into his mouth and hope that everything worked out. But he couldn’t decide; he couldn’t think through the buzzing in his head, so he chose the last by default and let himself be guided down to a mattress.

  ‘The first crossing is the hardest,’ Sophus said, unfolding the blindfold, ‘but also the most rewarding.’

  Something in Danyl’s mind clicked. He understood. He knew why the map leading to this room appeared in mysterious blue envelopes, and why the entrance was guarded by riddles and codes and mysterious spiral dollars. It was all artifice. A fake mystery. A lure; a trap to draw people here. But a lure by whom? Why? ‘Stop!’ Danyl batted Sophus’s hand away. ‘I need to think.’

  ‘You can think in the Real City,’ Sophus replied, and his voice was still soft, but with a hint of steel in it. ‘You’ll have all the answers there, all the time in the world.’ Danyl tried to stand, but Sophus pressed down on his shoulder. Danyl braced himself. And then a buzzer sounded. The door to the hall swung open.