Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  ‘I’m a psychologist,’ Steve explained. The drawer contained pens, a stapler, a bag of pot, obsolete computer peripherals. ‘And what’s this?’ He picked up a thick roll of cash tucked in the back corner. ‘That’s a lot of money for someone on an archivist’s salary.’

  The secretary peered at it. ‘That’s not real money,’ he said. ‘Look. The denomination is n+1. And the symbol on it is a spiral.’

  ‘An alternative system of currency,’ Steve breathed. ‘This conspiracy is more diabolical than I thought.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ll show you. Do you have any cash?’

  The secretary produced a five-dollar note. Steve held it next to the spiral dollar. ‘Which of these is worth more?’

  ‘The real one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a form of social contract,’ the secretary replied. ‘The note is worthless, but we all agree to believe that it’s worth something because it’s a very convenient symbol of value.’

  ‘It is a symbol,’ Steve agreed, disappointed that the secretary’s answer was so cogent. ‘It’s a pointer to other things, like value and trust, and they point back to money. That is what reality is. A network of symbols and pointers. Masks behind masks. These people,’ he flapped the spiral dollar, ‘the archivist and his co-conspirators, they want to attack those symbols. They want to attack reality itself. We have to stop them. But first we have to find them.’

  ‘Blet,’ said Kim, behind them. ‘Klo bey blet reware.’ He was flipping through a large hardback book that he’d picked up from beside the archivist’s computer monitor. He opened it to the inside cover and displayed it to Steve and the secretary.

  ‘Tnex.’

  It was a book on counterfeiting. There was a large black stamp beneath the title on the first page:

  Purchased from

  Ye Undergrounde Bookshoppe

  Access via the basement steps down ye nameless alleyway

  on Aro Street

  Beneath the stamp was a picture of a spiral.

  ‘The symbol of Gorgon,’ Steve said gritted his teeth and spoke in a low growl. ‘Proof of the archivist’s complicity. This election was a fraud. And, according to the Te Aro Charter’—he indicated the document on the far wall—‘as runner-up, I am the rightful new Councillor.’

  ‘Actually,’ the secretary gave an apologetic cough, ‘Kim was runner-up. He came second. You came last.’

  Kim said, ‘Blego!’

  Steve took a second to absorb this unhappy news, then said, ‘But Kim abdicates his position to me. Right, Kim?’

  ‘Ea.’ Kim shook his head vigorously, frowning, and made a slashing motion with his hand. ‘Kanb ea!’

  ‘There,’ Steve said. ‘You see? Now, as de facto Councillor of Te Aro, I order you both to accompany me to the nameless alley.’ He slapped his crowbar against his open palm. ‘It’s time to do a little book shopping.’

  28

  Gorgon

  Steve kicked open the door to the bookshop and stepped through it, Lightbringer raised, ready to swing at any archivist or bookshop clerk who came at him.

  But the entrance wasn’t guarded. Beyond the door was a small clear space with a table, cash register and rocking chair; beyond that were wooden shelves stretching from the floor to the low, dimly lit ceiling and radiating out into the unseen reaches of the room. It was impossible to tell how large the space was, or if any enemies lurked out there in the darkness. Sound in the room was muted: their footfalls on the bare concrete were swallowed by the thousands of books.

  Steve’s hearing was far more powerful than that of most humans. He listened, tuning out the sounds of Kim and the secretary, who had followed him; he tuned out the hum of the lights overhead, water hissing in distant pipes, the central heating of the building. And out there, just at the edge of the audible spectrum he heard something: voices in the distance and between the voices an odd sound: a repetitive thumping, like the beating of the bookshop’s dark and musty heart.

  He whispered to Kim and the secretary. ‘This way.’ He led them into the shelves, towards the sounds, his senses on high alert. The thumping grew louder. Steve came to a fork in the path through the books. He turned left, then cursed as he tripped and fell. He landed on something soft. A person? He wasn’t sure, so he bit into it. The thing did not scream. And it didn’t taste like a person. He unclenched his jaw and pushed himself up onto his knees.

  A mattress. He’d fallen on a mattress. No—a whole pile of mattresses. Thin, foam ones; dozens of them. And beyond them lay another pile, and another.

  Steve clambered over them and stepped onto another path through the shelves. He was very close to the thumping noise now, and he could hear the voices. Two women: a low murmur back and forth. The thumping sounded like something being dropped, picked up and dropped again, over and over.

  He turned and signalled to Kim and the secretary to go down the other row, circle around and come at the voices from the opposite side to Steve. They gave the thumbs-up sign and crawled over the mattresses to him, ignoring his gestures while he waved at them and mouthed, ‘No! No!’

  They refused to turn back, and the group continued on down another row of shelves stocked not with books but with large cardboard boxes. Steve paused under a fluorescent light and checked the box labels. Some of them were filled with blankets. Others contained syringes and adult nappies. The final shelf in the row was empty except for three plastic trays filled with hundreds of blue envelopes packed in together neatly. Steve opened one of the envelopes. Inside he found a map, half of which showed the Aro Valley, the rest of which depicted a vast and bewildering labyrinth.

  The thumping came from just beyond the last shelf. Steve took a breath. He nodded at Kim and the secretary. He stepped out into the light.

  It was an open space extending to the concrete walls at the back of the room. There were boxes everywhere. The thumping echoing through the room was the sound of two women taking books from the shelves and dropping them into the boxes. They stopped when Steve appeared. He looked them up and down and said to the closer of the two, ‘Verity?’

  ‘Steve?’

  ‘Well,’ said Steve. ‘Well. Well. Well.’ He strolled towards the women, twirling his crowbar like a ringmaster menacing a troupe of mutinous clowns. ‘So the conspiracy is revealed.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Why, I’m looking for Gorgon.’

  ‘Gorgon?’ Verity cast a concerned glance at the second woman, who gave a tiny shrug. Verity turned back to Steve and said, ‘She’s busy.’

  ‘She?’ Steve looked amused. ‘Tell her she has official visitors.’

  Verity sat back on her knees. She looked hot from her work. She picked up a bottle of water and drank from it. The second woman spoke; Steve recognised her now. It was Eleanor, Verity’s friend who owned the Dolphin Café. ‘We’re busy too,’ she snapped. ‘Beat it, deadbeat.’

  ‘You have to go,’ Verity added. ‘Now. Please.’

  Steve refused to acknowledge her absurd request and snapped, ‘There is no Gorgon, is there? You and the archivist made it all up. You faked her.’

  Verity looked genuinely confused. ‘Why would we do that?’

  ‘You know why.’ The stolen archive was probably right here somewhere, hidden in one of the boxes, Steve thought. But which one? There were hundreds. ‘You have something,’ he said. ‘Something we want. Something very valuable.’

  Verity and the archivist both glanced towards a mound of boxes stacked against the wall. Steve calculated the intersecting angles of their gaze and identified an ordinary box on the top of the pile. So: that was the secret archive. It was smaller than he’d expected. And, now that he inspected it, he noticed a faint blue glow emanating from a tear in the cardboard. Why would the secret archive glow?

  ‘We don’t have anything for you, Steve. And you’re trespassing. Get out. The bookshop is closed.’

  ‘Oh, but I’m not trespassing. I happ
en to be the new Te Aro Councillor. I can go anywhere I want and do anything I want.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ the secretary said quickly. ‘The role is mostly ceremonial.’

  ‘What’s more,’ Steve continued, raising his voice to drown out any future unhelpful comments from the secretary, ‘I can impound property and belongings. All of these boxes are now the property of the Te Aro Council Subcommittee for Public Safety.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘So either we search through all of these boxes until we find what we’re looking for,’ Steve said to Verity, ‘or you turn the secret archive over to us now and we all find out whatever big mystery is hidden inside it.’

  ‘What secret archive?’ Verity looked even more confused, but Eleanor did not. Comprehension was dawning in her eyes. Steve pointed at her. ‘Ask your accomplice there. She knows.’

  Verity turned. Eleanor hesitated, then said to her, ‘About ten years ago, Gorgon ordered the old Councillor—the Sheriff—to destroy all the records …’ She licked her lips and glanced at Steve. ‘The records of what happened at Threshold. Last week we learned that the Sheriff disobeyed. Instead he hid the records in a safe in the closet in his chamber.’

  Verity looked wary. ‘And now they’ve vanished? Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Eleanor nervously. ‘The archivist didn’t take them. He’s at Threshold.’

  ‘Well if he didn’t steal them, and this idiot didn’t take them’ —Verity flicked her hand at Steve—‘that only leaves …’

  An expression of dread came over Eleanor’s face. ‘The Adversary.’

  Steve said, ‘The who?’

  Verity nodded. ‘And now the Adversary knows about Ogilvy and Threshold. They’ll figure out what’s beneath the valley.’

  ‘Hey? Hello? Excuse me?’ Steve tapped his crowbar against a shelf. The sound rang out in. ‘Remember me? Are you saying you don’t have the archive? You expect me to believe that?’

  Verity turned to him. ‘I know it doesn’t look like it’—she gestured at the boxes of books—‘but what we’re doing down here is the most important thing in the whole world right now. Someone is trying to stop us. We don’t know who they are; we just know they’re very smart and very ruthless. They are the Adversary.’

  ‘I’m your Adversary!’ Steve pointed at his chest with his thumb.

  ‘Oh please, Steve. Our real Adversary is dangerous. Competent. We need to find out who they are before they ruin everything. You can help us.’

  ‘Help you? I don’t think so. You’re in a lot of trouble, Verity. First you vanish mysteriously. Now you’re down here operating a bookshop without a permit.’ Steve ticked off crimes on his fingers. ‘Stacking mattresses in violation of Te Aro bylaws. Boxing books in an unsafe manner. Whatever you’re doing down here …’ He stopped, frowned. ‘Where’s that eerie music coming from?’

  Everyone listened. At first there was nothing; just the subterranean silence of the bookshop. But the rest of them soon heard it too: distant music, notes rising and falling. A child’s tune played on a wind instrument like a flute or a recorder. It came from somewhere deep underground, beyond the walls.

  ‘It’s her,’ said Eleanor. ‘She comes.’

  ‘Her who? Who comes?’ But Steve already knew the answer. Gorgon. He looked around the room again and this time he saw the curtain. A thick fabric hung over a shadowed section of the wall. Steve’s keen senses detected subtle shifts in the fabric and micro-changes in air density. There was a hidden passageway there.

  ‘Steve.’ Verity said. ‘You need to go. Now. Run.’

  Steve thought about it. Should he run? He analysed Verity’s physiological signals: the fluttering at her temples, the moistness of her eyes and the stress in her voice. She was frightened by whatever was making that music and coming towards them down the passageway. Maybe he should run? Or could he use Verity’s fear to his advantage?

  He turned towards Kim, who was closest to the blanket draped on the wall. ‘Kim!’ he called out. ‘Tear down that curtain!’

  ‘Blas,’ Kim replied. He loped towards the curtain with an obedient grin. Verity and the archivist chorused, ‘No!’ and ran to intercept him. Over this din of voices and footsteps the music came again, very close, just behind the curtain; the same haunting childhood tune. Bind me. Blind me. Or Gorgon will find me.

  Steve took advantage of the chaos to run towards the glowing cardboard box. Maybe Gorgon was real. Maybe this mysterious Adversary was real, and maybe the Adversary took the secret archive, or, maybe it was all a lie and the archive was right here, within Steve’s grasp. Well, he would find out. He sped towards the box and raised his crowbar. Verity reversed and tried to intercept him but she was too slow and far too late.

  He swung. The box caved inwards, revealing that it didn’t contain the secret archive after all, but rather countless vials filled with a glowing blue compound, which now exploded into millions of fragments of glass and radiant droplets. These rained upon Steve, soaking his clothes and splattering his face.

  Verity slid to her knees. She scrambled backwards, away from the glowing blue liquid. Her mouth was opening and closing but no sound came out. Maybe there was something wrong with her? Steve didn’t know. He turned to watch Kim and Eleanor struggle. Their thrashing bodies tore the curtain from its hooks: it draped itself over them, revealing a long, dark passageway receding into the distance. There was a woman moving down it, coming towards the bookshop. She moved with an odd lurching gait. A wild tangle of hair surrounded her head. Another step, and she would emerge into the light.

  And then all the luminance and all the shadow in the room drained away; reality dissolved, and Steve found himself in the Real City.

  29

  The Real City

  It went on forever.

  Steve was in the exact centre of a vast circular plaza. The ground was a muted grey, the colour of a cloud backlit by sunlight. Radiating out from the plaza were countless pathways seamlessly joined to it, all fashioned from the same dull substance, all stretching out into the fathomless distance. Overhead was a cloudless, sunless, starless void.

  Where was this place? What was it? Steve didn’t know. After a few moments of intense, powerful thinking he decided that, wherever he was, it wasn’t real.

  Did that mean he was dreaming? No. Steve was an accomplished dreamer. A professional. He knew the difference between a dream and waking life. In a dream the space you occupied was mutable, shifting: but he’d stared at the vast, impossible space around him for several minutes now and it remained the same. This was no dream. It had to be the result of the glowing blue stuff hidden in the box he’d smashed open. It was obviously some kind of mind-altering drug.

  Did that mean that the vast impossible landscape around him was a hallucination? Steve had never taken any hallucinogenic drugs. His brain was a precision tool. It operated at the elite outer bounds of human thought. He didn’t believe in mistreating it. But he was almost a doctor of psychology. He knew how hallucinogens worked. They interfered with the brain’s ability to interpret sensory data. They altered your perception of reality. Steve wasn’t perceiving reality at all. Reality was gone. He’d never heard of any drug that did that. The glowing blue substance was something new. A class of compound that contemporary psychology hadn’t encountered before.

  Why had Verity manipulated Steve into exposing himself to it? To get him out of the way, clearly. They’d plotted against reality and they’d neutralised the only man who could stop them, tricking him with the old hide-the-drug-in-the-glowing-box-and-manipulate-Steve-into-smashing-it-with-a-crowbar routine. And he’d fallen for it. Like an amateur. He thought back over the last confusing moments before he lost consciousness. Who was the woman in the dark passageway? Gorgon? Why didn’t Verity want anyone to see her? How was she connected to Ogilvy and Threshold? He vowed to find out when he returned to reality.

  If he returned.

  He looked around again and gave a little snort
of disgust at the monotony of the landscape, or mindscape, or drugscape, or whatever kind of scape he was imprisoned in. He was equidistant from all of the many pathways branching into infinity, so he picked a side of the plaza at random and moved towards it.

  How far did he walk? It seemed like a long way, a long time. He was inside his mind: why couldn’t he simply materialise wherever he wanted? Or cause this vast, dreary place to vanish entirely? He couldn’t even perceive his own body. Trying to think about it was like handling something slippery: if he tried to command his brain to look down at his legs, the thought dissolved before he could fully form it.

  After an unknowable amount of time he reached the edge of the plaza. The ground continued on, seamless and matte, transforming into a bridge projecting into nothing, spanning an impossible distance until it intersected with another bridge, which stretched from one side of the horizon to the other.

  Steve shuffled towards the edge and looked down. Nothing. An endless blur. What would happen if he stepped off? Would he wake, or fall forever?

  He stepped onto the bridge and continued on. Eventually it intersected with another bridge, and this led to another circular plaza with ten bridges branching off in different directions. He picked another direction at random. This led to another featureless plaza with more featureless bridges, and he continued on and on with no aim or destination, moving from nowhere to nowhere.

  Until he saw the Spiral.

  At first it was just a tiny dot in the distance. An imperfection in the otherwise uniform void, a dead pixel in the sky.

  He tried to approach it. Sometimes the pathways doubled back and it disappeared, and he was forced to backtrack, find new routes, but gradually it grew larger: a malevolent black polestar guiding him towards nothing but itself.

  The Spiral consisted of black spidery cracks, like fissures in the fabric of space. They formed a dense, complicated three-dimensional structure, coiling in the air, motionless but charged with a terrible potential energy. The Spiral could have appeared one second ago, tearing apart the very fabric of things, but it also looked like it had hung there for countless billions of years. The outer tendrils of the Spiral arced down towards a plaza. A single bridge connected to this plaza on the side opposite Steve, telescoping off into infinity.