Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley

by Danyl McLauchlan

  The man kneeling on the mattress next to the giant was Danyl.

  Danyl. Poor, sad Danyl. He was supposed to be far away in a facility somewhere: medicated, shuffling around in a daze, performing basic menial tasks: mowing lawns, cleaning toilets. Yet he was here in the valley finding his way into sinister bookshops and fraternising with giants. He’d broken free. Steve felt a surge of pride for his old friend, tempered with concern. Where was Danyl now? Trapped in the Real City? Or wandering the streets of Te Aro, helpless and vulnerable and afraid? Steve needed to find him.

  He called out to the giant. ‘Hey there!’ The creature ignored him. It strode past the council building, and Steve waved at it and called out again. No response. It strode up to the archive, glanced at the secretary on the ground, and then called into the darkness beyond the doorway, ‘Joy?’

  Joy? Who was Joy? Steve had to stop the giant from entering the archive. He grabbed Lightbringer. He slid down the rooftop, lowered himself from its edge, and dropped. He landed on the ground and rolled, sustaining moderate injuries to his left ankle, both legs, his right hip, lower back and left shoulder. Then he was up, limping after the giant, commanding him to stop in the name of the Subcommittee for Public Safety.

  But he was too late. The giant stepped over the secretary’s body and through the doorway into the archive. The door swung shut behind it. Steve heard it call out ‘Joy?’ again, and this was followed by a terrible roar and loud crashing that sounded to Steve like bodies being tossed against shelves, followed by running footsteps and desperate screams. The noise lasted for about thirty seconds. There was a final scream of ‘Joy!’, a final patter of footsteps, then silence.

  Steve approached the building. He stood outside the entrance and listened. His powerful ears heard birds. Insects. Distant cars. But nothing from inside.

  He opened the door and entered the archive.

  PART III

  33

  Danyl unchained

  Danyl woke.

  He lay on a cold floor. A blanket was draped over his body. He craned his neck and looked around.

  He was in a large sunlit room. The floor was tiled. The tiles continued halfway up the wall: they’d been white once, but were now stained and chipped. The ceiling was high overhead. There were no windows. The light came in through a glass skylight which was cracked and mottled with mould.

  He tried to stand and was disappointed to learn that he couldn’t because his left wrist was chained to a pipe. The pipe protruded from the wall and ran to a stainless steel bath at the far end of the room. There was a door nearby. The air smelled damp. It was very cold.

  Where was he? Danyl tried to think. He remembered … Ye Undergrounde Bookshoppe. The catacombs. Stumbling out of the culvert. The Threshold development, and the ruined townhouse filled with bodies. Fleeing from the Cartographers. He remembered the house from Verity’s photograph. The grave. Then the goat-faced man shot him with a dart-gun; reality drained away and he found himself in the Real City.

  Once Danyl recovered from the shock of reality disappearing and being replaced with something utterly alien, he examined his surroundings. It appeared to be a vast plaza. He counted the pathways branching off from it. There were 136 with a blank space where the 137th should have been. When he stood before it, he could make out a tiny black spot in the far distance.

  The Spiral.

  He headed towards it. The Spiral grew larger, but then he passed through a succession of plazas that took him further away from it until it was out of sight. He tried to retrace his steps; he wandered down immeasurable paths until suddenly the Real City faded and the world knit itself together in front of his eyes, and he found himself lying in this decaying bathroom, handcuffed to the plumbing.

  It was good to be back in good old reality again, even if he didn’t know quite which bit of reality he was imprisoned in. One of the half-finished townhouses at Threshold, he guessed.

  Well, Danyl figured, now that he was awake he should probably try to escape. He inspected the steel handcuff, tapping it with his fingertips and rattling it against the pipe. It looked exactly like a handcuff in the movies. The steel seemed very strong.

  What about the pipe? One end led to the bath, the other to the wash-basin. He stood and tugged with his cuffed hand, theorising that he could tear the pipe out of the wall. It did not move and the cuff bit into the flesh of his wrist. It really hurt.

  Escape was clearly impossible. Danyl decided to wait and see what his captors had in store for him. He leaned against the wash-basin, crossed his legs and made himself comfortable, then patted his belly, wondering when a Cartographer would be along to feed him.

  Someone grunted.

  The sound came from the bath. Danyl craned his neck and tried to see over the rim. There was a green wool blanket inside the bath, covering something bulky. Another grunt. The blanket shifted. There was someone underneath it.

  Danyl called out, ‘Are you OK? Can you hear me? I can’t help you. I’m chained to a pipe.’

  The only answer was more grunting. And maybe it was the acoustics of the room, but it sounded like the grunting of a very large man. The blanket shifted again and Danyl watched in transfixed horror as the blanket rose to the top of the bath, slipping back to reveal an enormous black leather boot with blood-red stitching, which came to rest on the rim.

  Danyl recognised that boot. It was the giant’s. The creature must have been drugged, just like Danyl, and dumped in the bathtub, and now the drug was wearing off. Danyl’s thoughts became very calm and very focused. He had to get out of this bathroom. The beast might wake any second.

  Danyl examined the cabinet below the wash-basin. The pipe entered it through a hole in the side. He opened the cabinet door. The pipe attached to a mixer unit where it joined a second pipe, which disappeared into the wall. All Danyl needed to do was disassemble the mixer, pull the pipe out of the cabinet and slip his handcuff loose.

  He lay on the floor in an L-shape, his head and torso inside the cabinet. The pipe was bolted to the mixer and did not shift when Danyl twisted it with his fingers, so he tugged off his belt, laid the metal clasps of the buckle flat against the top of the bolt, wrapped the strap around it and pulled.

  The bolt gave. Water spilled out from the join between the mixer and the pipe. Danyl pulled again; the pipe jolted and came loose, sending a high-pressure stream of water gushing into the confined space of the wash-basin. It was difficult to wrestle the pipe out through the hole, since Danyl’s mouth and eyes were filled with very cold water, but he managed it. Once it was free of the cabinet, he forced it down to the floor and the handcuff slipped off.

  Free Danyl! He picked up his belt and looped it through his pants, regarded himself in the mirror and rewarded his reflection with a triumphant thumbs up, then splashed across the rapidly spreading pool of water to the door. Which was locked from the outside.

  That made sense: Danyl was a prisoner, after all. But, he reasoned, it couldn’t be too hard to break the door down. If it was impregnable then his captor wouldn’t have bothered to cuff him to the pipe. Danyl shoved at the door. It shuddered a little, but held firm. He kicked it. Nothing. He waded to the opposite wall—the water was already ankle-deep and rising fast—and ran at the door, slamming into it with his shoulder. He bounced off it and fell into the water, sending waves splashing against the walls.

  He climbed to his knees, his clothes soaked. He looked around the room looking for something, anything that could help him escape.

  There was the wash-basin. The pipe. The toilet. The bathtub, with the blanket and the massive boot with the blood-red stitching, and the groans getting louder. Danyl forced himself to keep calm, think rationally. He waited for inspiration as the water rose to his knees and then his waist. But nothing came, and the water reached the rim of the bath and spilled into it. The groans from inside the bath transformed to roars. There was no way out of the room and the giant was waking. Its massive legs kicked in the air, then its boots found
purchase on the side of the bath. It began to rise.

  Danyl panicked. He let out a roar of his own and flung himself at the blanket and rained blows upon it.

  34

  Old friends

  The first thing Steve saw when he stepped inside Te Aro Archive was the comatose body of the giant. It lay sprawled on the floor just inside the entrance, its eyes wide open, unseeing. Its chest was rising and falling and a dozen darts were embedded in its torso. Books and papers were scattered everywhere. Some of the shelves were tipped on their sides. Others were broken beneath the bodies of unconscious Cartographers who’d been hurled into walls or shelves or onto burst cardboard boxes by the giant’s wrath. The whole building stank of DoorWay: a rich organic brine. Shards of broken glass glittered in the light. Stains of sky blue soaked the floor.

  Steve wasn’t going back to the Real City. Not by being shot with a dart gun, and not by stepping on contaminated broken glass. He needed protection. He knelt and laid Lightbringer on the ground. Working quickly, he unlaced the giant’s boots and wrenched them off its terrible feet. They were large enough to fit over Steve’s own shoes. He slipped them on.

  Someone coughed.

  The sound came from the back of the archive. Steve made his way towards it, glass crunching underfoot.

  Eleanor lay on the floor, propped against a fallen shelf. One side of her face was bruised. She looked up at Steve, coughed again and said, ‘So. It’s you. I underestimated you.’ She grimaced from the pain. ‘But Gorgon isn’t here. Your trap failed.’

  ‘My trap?’ Steve sneered. ‘I didn’t set a trap. The only trap that failed was your trap to trap me, because I knew it was a trap.’

  Steve’s logic was so powerful that Eleanor did not even acknowledge it. Instead she nodded her head at the fallen giant. ‘Sending him in was a masterstroke. We didn’t anticipate it. Very clever.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Steve smiled.

  ‘How did you get him to attack us?’

  Steve did not reply because that was actually a pretty good question. He remembered the giant striding towards the archive clutching something in its hand. He held up a cautioning finger and said to Eleanor, ‘Wait there please.’ Then he returned to the fallen beast.

  There was something in its grasp. Something blue.

  Fortunately Steve had Lightbringer. He prised the giant’s fingers apart with it. Hidden inside them was a blue envelope. Steve tugged it free, took the letter from the envelope and read:

  Dear Giant,

  If you want to rescue Joy, you’ll find her at Te Aro Archive at 12 pm today.

  Yours,

  A Friend.

  The writing was identical to the note Steve had found in the abandoned garage. He returned to Eleanor and held it out to her. She read it and sighed. ‘We’ve been set up.’ She let the note slip to the floor.

  ‘Me? Set up? Impossible.’ Steve thought a bit more. ‘Set up by who?’

  ‘By Verity.’

  ‘Isn’t Verity on your side?’

  ‘She’s betrayed me. Betrayed Gorgon. And you. Everyone.’ She shifted position, grimacing again, and drew something from her pocket. Another blue letter. She fumbled, dropping it on the floor, then picked it up and held it out. ‘See for yourself.’

  Steve took the letter and positioned it under the light.

  Ellie,

  I know who the Adversary is. They’ll be at the archive today at 12 pm.

  Verity.

  The writing was the same.

  Steve was confused. He asked Eleanor, ‘What does this mean?’

  ‘It means this was a distraction. A ruse to get me and the Cartographers out of the way while Verity does something very foolish.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something that puts our universe at risk. You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ Steve squatted down to Eleanor’s eye level. ‘But you’re going to tell me anyway, prisoner.’

  ‘Prisoner?’

  ‘That’s right. You’re wounded. Your Cartographers are beaten. And there’s no Gorgon to save you. You are mine.’

  Eleanor smiled through her pain. ‘You’ve got it the wrong way around, Steve. It’s you who is my prisoner.’

  Steve smiled back. She was obviously bluffing. Right? He tightened his grip on Lightbringer and glanced over his shoulder, checking to see if reinforcements had arrived. But there was no one around. Just him, Eleanor, the drugged giant and the unconscious Cartographers. The broken shelves and drifts of paper.

  But then, reality—the boxes, the shelves, the entire building—flickered like a reflection in a briefly lit window, and Steve glimpsed something else behind it; something very familiar: a plaza, pathways, an endless void.

  He whispered, ‘No.’ He said it again, more firmly. Then he glanced down at his hand holding the blue letter. It was damp. His fingers were stained a faint blue.

  He dropped the paper and it floated to the floor. But it was too late. He could feel feel the drug drug working already. Eleanor had trapped him after all: tricked tricked him with the old drugged drugged letter trick trick. And he’d fallen for it it it.

  Eleanor’s voice was distant; an echo of an echo. ‘So long, Steve,’ it said, ‘I’ll take good care of this universe while you’re gone.’

  He walked through the now familiar plazas and pathways of the Real City, its Spiral pulsating in the distance, and while he walked, he thought.

  Eleanor said that by betraying Gorgon Verity was putting the universe at risk. Which implied Gorgon was saving the universe, somehow. Which was absurd. And even if she was, that didn’t change anything. Gorgon had stolen the Te Aro election and her agents had drugged Steve. Twice. She was going down. Te Aro would be Steve’s, and the rest of the universe would have to take care of itself.

  And what was Verity’s role in all this? Why did she lure Steve, the giant and the Cartographers to the archive at the same time? Whose side was she on? And where was poor Danyl? How did he fit into the puzzle? And who was the mysterious Adversary?

  Then Steve noticed something odd. The Real City had changed since he was here last. A minor alteration, barely noticeable, but his powerful and all-seeing subconscious had picked it up and alerted him.

  He stopped wandering and looked around. He stood in a plaza with four bridges connecting to it. The Spiral hung overhead in the medium distance. Everything else was void, the colour of rain.

  What was it? What had Steve’s non-rational mind seen? He rotated about, trying to figure it out. It was something to do with the number of pathways in the plazas …

  He was just about to grasp it, when he woke.

  ~

  He lay on a hard surface. Some kind of scratchy fabric covered his face. The light was murky. Was he back in his own reality? Or another, different reality? Steve needed to be careful here. He’d read mid-twentieth-century science fiction so he knew that once you started switching realities you ran into problems with nested levels of existence. Which one was real? How could you tell?

  Also, which way was up? He groaned and shifted position. He was wrapped in some sort of thick fabric and was confined on three sides by a cold, hard surface. Wherever he was, it was very noisy: there was a rushing sound, like torrential rain, interspersed with occasional thuds. The thuds grew louder, then came the sound of someone running through water, a louder thud still, then a pitiful whimper followed by nearly inaudible sobbing.

  Steve tried to roll over but something pulled tight at his ankle. His leg was handcuffed to what looked like a metal handle. He pulled at the fabric covering him: it was some sort of blanket. He fumbled at it for a few seconds but this only tangled him further. Relax, he reminded himself. Be very calm. Take deep breaths. Remember the awesome power of your own mind. You can unlock that power and untangle yourself from this blanket, but you must remain calm and in control.

  He took another deep breath and felt his muscles relax and his mind fill with peace. That’s when the water breached the rim of the bat
h and flooded over it.

  Steve leapt to his feet, hyperventilating from the cold. He was still in shock when someone leapt on top of him, screaming.

  It had been a while since Steve last fought off an attacker while he was blinded and chained and half-submerged in freezing water. He spluttered as his face was forced underwater; he fumbled weakly against his assailant to no effect. Then his cunning returned: Steve went limp, he let his attacker push him down; he held his breath and offered no resistance, relying on his superior lung capacity to keep him conscious.

  The trick worked. Within a few seconds the attacker relaxed his grip and Steve struck back, struggling to his feet and lashing out blindly through the blanket. He struck something solid and heard a loud splash, following by howl: ‘My cheekbone!’

  He knew that voice! He tore the blanket off his head. He saw now that he was in a tiled bathroom filling with water. An ill-kempt bearded man bobbed in the water, clutching the left side of his face. His eyes widened when he saw Steve, who cried out, ‘Danyl!’

  35

  What Danyl did

  ‘I put the giant’s boots on to protect my feet while I stormed the archive.’ Steve was coming to the end of his long and partly accurate story describing the election and its aftermath and his war against Gorgon. ‘But the forces of the Cartographers overwhelmed me.’

  Danyl nodded. That made sense. He felt a surge of affection for Steve. All this time he’d been looking for Verity, but it was Steve who was his true friend. Steve! Danyl felt relaxed. For the first time since he’d returned to the valley, he felt that things were going to be OK.

  Steve looked around the room. It was still filling with water. He asked, ‘What’s the sitstatrep?’