Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  Danyl could move again. He reached for his pocket to silence the phone before Sophus and the Goatman heard it. The name of the tune popped into his head: The Surprise Symphony by Haydn. Then Danyl remembered where he’d been the last time he’d heard that tune. He whispered ‘Oh no’ just as the giant growled in recognition.

  ‘It was you!’ Its hands seized Danyl and flipped him onto his back. ‘You were in my house. You booby-trapped my bedroom.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Danyl tried to push himself up on his elbows but the giant was straddling him; two gigantic knees pinned Danyl’s arms to his sides. ‘I can explain everything.’

  ‘That’s good. Where’s Joy?’

  Danyl shook his head. ‘I don’t know that. I don’t—’

  ‘Oh.’ The giant looked sad, disappointed. It drew back a fist, ready to drive it through Danyl’s delicate skull. Suddenly a beam of torchlight illuminated its face. Sophus and the Goatman had heard the roar and were shining their torches at it. The giant shielded its eyes, dazzled; its knees pinning Danyl in place shifted, and Danyl seized his chance. He slithered between the giant’s thighs. The concrete slab beneath him shuddered as a massive fist struck the ground where he’d lain a second earlier. Then he was free and there was only one escape route.

  19

  Stream of consciousness

  He hung in the air for a second, the giant behind him, the black water beneath him, the beams of the torches cutting through the darkness, and he thought about Einstein.

  Danyl wasn’t scientifically trained, like Ann was. He didn’t understand chemistry, or biology or physics. But he had recently spent a lot of time in a secure hospital ward where the only reading material consisted of either popular science magazines or the Bible. Danyl opted for the magazines, and a lot of the articles in them were about Einstein.

  People used to think that time was a flowing river. Einstein showed that they were wrong. He proved that it was a fixed dimension intersecting with the three spatial dimensions to form a static four-dimensional block. Space-time. Space-time did not flow. If time was a river, it was a frozen one. Nothing moved. The flow of time was an illusion brought about by the way we perceived the world. It seemed as if time was passing as we lived, that we were making choices, that we were masters of our lives. Danyl learned that this was false, and that the future was already there, frozen in place: all the events in our lives were doomed to happen. From the very instant the universe collapsed into existence, long before Danyl was born, before the evolution of his race, before the formation of Earth and the nucleosynthesis of our sun, he was doomed to jump into the Waimapihi Stream. And he’d known it, somehow. As soon as the giant had entered the basement, Danyl knew the beast would unmask him and turn on him, and the instant he entered the tunnel and heard that muted roar in the distance, Danyl sensed that he’d end up in the stream. His choices weren’t choices. He was trapped by fate, which carried him through fixed points of sequential space-time towards a doom that he was powerless to defy.

  The last thing Danyl saw before he hit the water was the giant’s hand grabbing for him. And then his head slipped under the water and he sank beneath the icy darkness.

  This was hardly the first time Danyl had dived into a swift-moving body of water in a desperate bid for freedom. But this underground stream was colder and deeper than any of the other rivers, culverts or canals he’d plunged into recently. Colder and deeper and faster. He flailed about and righted himself; his feet found purchase on the streambed, but before he could stand up the current pulled him on, sweeping him away from the confusion of lights and angry faces above him. The next time he came up for air the light was gone.

  Danyl swallowed and coughed. He closed his eyes. They stung from the terrible cold, and, anyway, there was nothing to see. The darkness was absolute. He drifted with the current for a minute then felt around with his arms and kicked with his feet, trying to find the walls. They were close. The tunnel had narrowed, and when he tried to stand his head collided with the concrete roof. The accessway was gone. He was trapped in a confined stormwater drain deep underground.

  At least you escaped the giant, Danyl reminded himself. That was the immediate threat. He could probably survive in the water for several more minutes before his core temperature fell too low and his heart failed and he died. Everything was fine.

  He lay back and let himself be borne by the current and tried to calculate his destination. Where did the stream resurface? It didn’t come out anywhere in the Aro Valley. After leaving the valley it flowed beneath the Capital, but it didn’t resurface there either. It ran all the way to the harbour. A distance of several kilometres. Probably not a survivable journey. He’d die of hypothermia long before being swept out to sea, if the roof didn’t slope below the waterline and drown him first. Maybe, now that Danyl thought about it, drifting with the stream wasn’t so smart?

  He decided to turn back.

  He braced himself between the roof and the wall. This was harder than it sounded because he had no feeling in his hands. He kicked out with his feet and found the muddy bottom of the tunnel, and after a little floundering and some minor drowning he stood in a cramped, squatting position. The water came to just below his nose and the current was strong. He waded against it, pressing his hands against the sides of the narrow space. Step by shivering, tentative step, he made his way back up the tunnel.

  How long and how far had he floated downstream? He didn’t know. His plan was to walk until he saw the torch lights of Sophus and the Goatman, and improvise from there. But progress was slow. Time passed, although whether it did so in seconds or many hours Danyl wasn’t sure. He began to shake. He lost his grip on the wall and stumbled. Soon he’d be swept away. Was he close to the accessway? He must be. Should he shout for help? Was it better to freeze to death or be beaten by a giant?

  He was struggling with this dilemma when he walked into the steel bars. He cried out and stood, hitting his forehead on a wooden beam overhead, which rattled from the impact. His cries of pain echoed around the tiny, dark space. He felt the bars with his numb hands and established that they were vertical. They were too narrow for him to fit through and there was a build-up of branches, leaves and organic matter on the other side of them.

  He’d gone the wrong way, gotten lost in the darkness. He must have bypassed the accessway and continued up the stormwater drain. An easy mistake to make. It seemed unfair to Danyl that such a simple miscalculation would probably kill him in the next minute or two.

  Because he’d stopped shaking. His body had used up all its available energy. He felt his heart beating, and each beat seemed slower and fainter than the last.

  Danyl was dying.

  So this was how it ended for him. Freezing to death in the mud and darkness in the catacombs beneath the Aro Valley. How fitting, he thought, calmer now that he accepted its inevitability. This was always going to be his doom. Always. And really, this wasn’t such a bad way to go. Quiet. Peaceful. Numb. Those three words kept repeating themselves in his mind, and he sank down into the mud and felt himself drifting away.

  Danyl dreamed about sex.

  Warmth. Lips. Tongues. His thoughts drifted through a sea of sensual impressions, detached from any detail or time or place, until he half woke to find himself in a soft, warm bed, with a soft, warm woman beside him.

  He reached out and touched her back. She sighed. It was Verity. Time and place returned to him. He was in their house on Devon Street. It was a few weeks after her exhibition opening. They’d had a terrible argument after Danyl broke open one of her cases during the party, but they’d made up and the exhibition was a critical and commercial success. Several reviewers insisted Verity’s unseen photographs were so brilliant they caused nausea and migraines, and the gallery was doing a brisk trade in empty plastic cases.

  Danyl rolled over and pressed himself against her, sliding his hand over her hip, inside her pyjamas. She sighed again and he pressed his palm against her thigh, and she said,
‘I’m sleeping. Lemme alone.’

  Danyl was half-asleep himself, still half-dreaming. He kissed her neck and embraced her, the sea of lips and tongues still ebbing in his mind. Verity muttered, ‘Get. Off.’ He kissed her neck again and fumbled with the buttons on her pyjama top and she turned and shoved his jaw, hard, then pivoted and pushed him with her foot. He tipped backwards and fell out of bed and knocked the top of his head on the corner of his bedside table.

  ‘Ow! What did you do that for?’

  ‘I told you to get off me.’

  ‘I was just being friendly.’

  ‘I know what you were doing.’

  He felt the top of his head. ‘My head is bleeding.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I think I tore open my scalp. Turn on the light. ’

  ‘Dammit, Danyl. It’s 4 am. I have work today.’

  ‘It’s not my fault. You kicked me.’

  Verity turned on her bedside lamp. There was a minor cut in Danyl’s scalp. He sat on the floor, naked and miserable, holding a pillowcase to his head to staunch the bleeding while Verity went downstairs to find an ice pack.

  He wiped a tear from the corner from his eye. This sorrow wasn’t caused by only his injury. Danyl had been sad a lot recently. A minute ago he’d been sleeping and dreaming, and he’d been happy. Now he was awake and bleeding and miserable. The whole day stretched out before him: hours piled upon hours. Nothing but tedious reality.

  He looked around the bedroom. It was piled with life’s debris. Almost everything belonged to Verity except a pile of Danyl’s dirty clothes in the corner. The furniture, the books, the pictures hanging on the walls were all Verity’s. Now his eyes settled on a photo sitting on the top shelf of a waist-high bookshelf.

  It was from her first exhibition; it was also, he recalled, the picture that Eleanor had found in a magazine, causing her to leave her monastery and seek out Verity in the Aro Valley. It showed a near-derelict house atop a slope dotted with ruins. The house looked like a post-war construction. It was two storeys, with a deck along the front looking out over the slope below, and a stairway with broken and missing steps leading up to the deck.

  Looking at this photograph compounded Danyl’s misery. People had lived in that house once. Slept in it. Dreamed in it. Tried to love in it and then bled on its floors. Now they were probably dead and gone, and their house was falling apart. Just like the house Danyl and Verity lived in now would one day crumble and fall. A tear ran down his cheek.

  ‘Danyl?’

  He looked up. Verity stood in the doorway. She held an ice tray wrapped in a tea towel, which she handed to him. ‘What’s wrong?’

  He sighed. ‘I was just thinking that it all seems pointless. Life …’ He started to gesture towards the photograph, but found he didn’t have the energy. He’d been feeling down for a while now. A terrible sadness had invaded his life, and it was gathering in intensity. He hadn’t written anything for weeks. Where did it come from? What was wrong with him?

  ‘Obviously life is pointless, if you think about it,’ Verity replied. ‘The trick is not to think about it. Distract yourself. That’s what art is for.’

  ‘So your art is just a distraction from the real truth?’

  ‘Partly,’ she admitted. ‘Mostly.’

  ‘And when you and Eleanor left home to search for something, you were just distracting yourselves from reality?’

  Verity’s smile died. ‘No. That was … different. That was about escaping it altogether.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter anymore. The way out wasn’t what it seemed.’ She blinked. ‘I’m going back to sleep.’ She climbed under the blankets and reached for her light. Danyl’s gaze returned to the photograph.

  The house in the centre of the frame was in focus. But there was something in the foreground of the picture. A pool. Although it was blurred. Danyl could see that it was small and round, sunken into the ground and edged by mossy paving stones. The water had an odd blue tinge to it. He’d seen the picture before, many times, but he’d never noticed the pool before.

  ‘Goodnight, Danyl.’ There was a click as Verity turned out the light. The picture vanished.

  But Danyl still thought about it. There was something else about the picture, something odd, and just before he fell asleep again he realised what it was. The picture was from Verity exhibition of Te Aro photographs, yet he’d never seen that house or those ruined buildings anywhere in the valley. He couldn’t even imagine where they’d be.

  He lay in the darkness of the blocked stormwater drain, his warmth and life bleeding out of him. He was almost completely numb now. His only physical sensation was the pain in his head from knocking it on the wooden beam.

  And soon that would be gone. All he needed to do was lie there: to sink into the mud and dissolve into nothing. That was the smart move. After all, what was the point of doing anything else? All these thoughts came from a voice inside his mind, a voice he’d always thought of as himself—but now that he lay in the mud, remembering, close to death, he realised it was the voice of his sickness. The depression. Unmedicated Danyl. It came into his life two years ago: it spoke to him and through him that night when he lay on the floor, bleeding. It went away when he went on the antidepressants, and in the last few days it had returned. Danyl’s brain had been buzzing at him and he’d ignored it but—he realised now—the buzzing wasn’t the sickness, but rather his brain trying to warn him against its approach. And he’d ignored his brain, mocked it—and now the sickness was triumphant. It had lured Danyl down here into the mud and darkness. It had manipulated his thoughts and led him here to die, and now it spread its wings above him, casting all his thoughts into shadow. It had won.

  Danyl accepted this without bitterness. Without regret. Without pain. He was beyond that. Soon even the pain in his head would be gone.

  Although it was odd, wasn’t it? Why was there a wooden beam overhead for Danyl to hit his head on? Wasn’t he encased in concrete? And why was he lying in mud and not water? He thought about this, knowing that these thoughts might be his last. Was the beam above him like the plank in the accessway? A makeshift bridge? If it was a bridge, what did it connect with? Entrances and exits from the tunnel?

  It doesn’t matter, the sickness replied, soothing, calm. Lie down. Be at peace.

  But Danyl was curious. Groaning, he pulled himself out of the mud. He could stand. He wasn’t in a drain anymore but some sort of tall, narrow maintenance area, probably for clearing away the debris lodged against the bars. He clawed his way up the wall and gripped the plank and pulled himself onto it. After a few seconds of agonised fumbling, he found the wall, the ledge the plank rested on, and the bottom of a flight of steps.

  Yes, they’re steps, the voice of the sickness conceded, but they are steps to nowhere. There’s nothing out there. There’s no escape, just a delay of the inevitable. And the voice was right. Danyl accepted that. But, inevitability aside, he did want to know where the steps led. So he crawled up them, each occasional beat of his heart like a hammer-blow to his chest. Each narrow stone step that he collapsed on felt as if it would be his last, yet somehow he continued on. After an unknown length of time, he realised he could see his hands. The darkness was no longer total.

  Danyl looked up and saw stars.

  20

  Threshold

  He stood in a culvert. It was a deep depression in the ground with rough steps cut into the mud leading up to the surface level. Wooden boards were fitted into the steps to stop them from eroding.

  The tunnel behind him, which he’d just crawled his way out of, was a large round pipe sloping downwards, deep into the earth. Looking closer, he saw the stubs of thick bars jutting from the roof. They’d been sawed through.

  A stream had once run into the hole, probably where the steps were now, but someone had diverted it and turned the flood tunnel into a secret route. But a route to where?

  He made his slow, painful way up the steps. The
beauty of the night sky glowing with stars filled Danyl with joy and silenced the voice of the sickness, temporarily at least. But dressed as he was in soaking wet clothes, and pretty much dying of hypothermia, he was still too weak to walk. He needed to get inside and get warm, fast. His plan was to crawl to the nearest house, pound on their front door and throw himself on the mercy of whoever answered. He scrabbled up the last few steps and out of the hole and looked around.

  He wasn’t sure where he was. Somewhere in the valley: the familiar hills rose up on either side of him. But which street? The roadway swept up a steep slope past rows of buildings, all of which were dark. Not a single light shone on the hillside. Not even a street lamp.

  This was a disappointing and possibly fatal development. What had happened? Had civilisation collapsed while Danyl was underground? Or was there a power cut?

  He climbed to his feet and stumbled towards the road. The intensity of the starlight made the scene look like a photo negative. The street was a white ribbon winding through black fields, with bright white paths and driveways intersecting it. Danyl reached it and lurched towards the nearest building. It was a townhouse: four homes with separate driveways and entrances combined into a single construct. There was something strange about it, though. Something missing, something wrong—but in Danyl’s exhausted state, it took a long time to figure out what it was.

  There weren’t any cars parked outside. Nor, now that his barely conscious brain noticed it, were there any mailboxes. Or fences. Or gardens. The hillside simply consisted of shadowy buildings surrounded by empty lots filled with weeds. That was weird. And spooky. What if Danyl had somehow crossed over into some alternate version of Te Aro? He remembered the cryptic message carved on Verity’s door, echoed by Steve when he stormed the basement. Death to the agents of the Real City. Was this the Real City?

  Then he saw the billboard. It stood in the middle of an empty section. Huge words were printed in bright black letters against the starlit background: