Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (4 page)

The rain had stopped. The wind blew sprays of icy mist up from the puddles and down from the trees, aiming it directly at Danyl. He stood on the street outside Aro Park, remembering the Free Market and the terrible events that came after it.

He sighed. He knew where to go next. The one person in the valley likely to know Verity's whereabouts. But he hesitated. Surely there was another way. Someone else? Anyone?

He looked around for inspiration. The sun was a vague grey blur just above the horizon. It was about nine in the morning. People should have been stumbling home from parties or making the way up the hill to the university, but there was no one about. Danyl was alone. There was no alternative.

The house was nestled between two apartment buildings. It was an old bungalow, handsomely refurbished with leadlight windows and fresh white paint. A sign on the door read:
The Dolphin Café is closed until further notice
.

The front windows were dark. Danyl pressed his nose against a frosted pane of glass. From deep inside came a faint glow of electric light.

His memory stirred. The Dolphin. How many times had he come here with Verity, laughing as they walked through the door; holding hands at a cosy table, taking their time over a romantic dinner before hurrying home to make love? At least twice. He sighed and tried the handle. It opened.

The hall was dark. There were three doors spaced evenly along the left-hand wall. They led to the dining room, the kitchen and the manager's office. The light came from the office.

Danyl softened his footfalls. He looked into the dining room. It was empty: chairs stacked on wooden tables, dusty wood-panelled walls receding into shadows. A sliding door in the opposite wall led into the service alley behind the restaurant. It was open: a confusion of muddy footprints criss-crossed the floor, leading from the alleyway to the waiter's entrance to the kitchen. He heard a clatter of bins coming from the alley. Three large men passed back and forth carrying sacks of rubbish.

He moved on before any of them glanced his way. He passed the kitchen—the door was ajar; the space beyond looked chaotic. More footprints criss-crossing the floor, several large basins stacked in a mound on the bench.

He reached the end of the hall and gave the office door a nudge. It swung inwards, revealing a cramped room dominated by a cluttered desk. A thin woman with a narrow face and huge black eyes sat at the desk. Instead of her customary white chef's apron she wore a sea-green bathrobe with a matching towel wrapped around her head. She rested her bare legs on the top of the desk. Spiral tattoos snaked around her ankles.

Eleanor.

Oh yes. Eleanor and Verity were old friends. They grew up together. They ran away from home together. Then they parted ways, forever, or so Verity thought, until that sunny afternoon two years ago when Eleanor appeared in their kitchen. Tanned, thin but muscular from her endless hours of yoga, with long straight hair and a face that looked serene and jolly until she looked at Danyl.

She'd been living in a Taoist monastery someplace in Asia, she told them. The Golden Pavilion of Complete Perfection. She ran the kitchen there and spent the rest of her time meditating on the nonexistence of reality, until one day an electrical fuse blew, plunging the Pavilion of Complete Perfection into darkness. Eleanor trudged down the mountainside to buy a replacement fuse at a nearby town. While she was waiting for the electrician to open his shop, she sat in lotus position in the dust beside a noodle stand, flipping through international magazines. She came across a story about Verity's photography award. ‘There was a picture of you,' Eleanor explained from the dark interior of the kitchen. ‘And there was this.'

She took a piece of paper from her pocket and laid it on the kitchen table. It was a crumpled reproduction of one of Verity's acclaimed Te Aro photos. It showed a hillside dotted with half-ruined buildings. It was taken from the bottom of the hill looking up. A gravel driveway flanked with weeds wound up the slope, terminating at a house at the top of the slope, perched on wooden pilings. Behind the house a bare stone cliff loomed out of the frame. Verity looked at it with a grim expression. Then she turned to Danyl and said, ‘Can you give us a minute? Ellie and I need to talk.'

And that was the beginning of the end. Eleanor moved in with them. She slept in their spare room. She ignored Danyl, and he did his best to ignore her. He pretended she wasn't there, pretended she wasn't doing nude yoga in his backyard every morning to greet the sun, and whispering, always whispering to Verity.

The house filled with these whispers. Danyl heard them in the middle of the night when he woke to find Verity's side of the bed empty; Verity in the spare room sitting cross-legged on the end of Eleanor's cot, whispering. They always broke off when he entered the room. He overheard fragments of conversations: words that meant nothing to him at the time: the city, the chemist, the conduit, the spiral.

Then one happy day, Eleanor left! She bought a crumbling old house on Aro Street and converted it into her restaurant, She worked all hours to build a kitchen, convert the dining room and garden, and recruit staff; occasionally she slept on a couch in her office. She was still on the periphery of Danyl's life: a darkness on the horizon, still encouraging Verity to leave him, and trying to make him feel bad about himself because she was building a successful business out of nothing while he spiralled into depression and total financial dependence on Verity. But at least she wasn't living with him anymore. Life went back to normal. For a time.

Now Verity was gone from his life but Eleanor was still here. She sat behind her desk in her stupid little office, with schedules and lists and diagrams covering the walls, frowning at her silly little smartphone as she tapped away at its screen. Eleanor hated Danyl. He knew that; and also that she would never intentionally reveal Verity's whereabouts, or tell him anything helpful. But perhaps she could be tricked? Could her hatred be turned against her? Perhaps—if he took her by surprise. He raised his hand to knock on the door.

‘Aren't you supposed to be locked in an asylum?' Eleanor did not look up at him. ‘Did you break out?'

Danyl transformed his knocking motion into a casual stroke of his hair and replied, ‘It wasn't an asylum. It was a residential treatment facility. And I released myself under my own cognisance.'

Eleanor put down her phone and leaned back in her chair, regarding Danyl with a sour expression. ‘And now you've come back to Te Aro.'

‘That's right. I think you know why I'm here.'

‘To beg for food?'

‘I don't need your charity. Someone already fed me breakfast. No. I've come for Verity.'

‘Verity threw you out.'

‘I want to give her the chance to fix that mistake.' He stepped into the room. ‘I've been to her home. Our home. It's been abandoned for months and there's a cryptic threat carved on the door.'

‘Oh?'

‘It said “Death to the agents of the Real City”. What does that mean?'

‘I don't know.'

‘I think you do.' Danyl took another step towards the desk. ‘I think that you think I don't know anything about what you think. But I know more than you think about what I know you think.'

‘OK. Time for you to leave, Danyl.' She reached for a brass bell on her desk. ‘Allow my kitchen hands to show you the gutter outside the door.'

‘I also know about the farm.'

Eleanor's hand froze. Danyl continued. ‘You and Verity grew up together. Best friends together in a tiny seaside town.'

Eleanor did not move.

‘Verity once told me about an abandoned farm on the outskirts of that town. She liked to go there when she wanted to be alone. Until one day the police raided it. There was a fugitive hiding in the farm buildings. Some kind of scientist. He'd set up a clandestine laboratory deep in the woods. The authorities brought in bulldozers and knocked it down. Any of this sound familiar?'

Eleanor was silent. Danyl opened his satchel and took out the mud-splattered journal cover. ‘I found this in Verity's bathroom. Someone burned her old journals but they left this cover, dated the same year the police raided that farm. And the same year that you and Verity ran away from home together, never to return. You know what's inside it?' He flipped the cover. ‘Nothing. And the fact that it contains nothing means something.'

Eleanor leaned forward, rested her elbows on her desk and cradled her head in her hands.

‘I think you and Verity crept onto the farm,' he went on, ‘after the police raid but before the bulldozers. I think you found the fugitive scientist's hidden laboratory, and you saw something. But what?' He smiled. ‘You'll never tell me, of course. You hate me. And there's no way to recover the contents of this notebook.' He cocked his head to one side and his smile widened. ‘Or is there?'

Eleanor still did not reply. Danyl reached into his satchel, took out his etching of the spiral shape and laid it face up on Eleanor's desk. ‘That's the reason the two of you ran away all those years ago, isn't it? You were seeking the spiral. Verity is still seeking it. It's why she's disappeared. What is it? Where is it? What is the Real City? Where is Verity?' He stood before the desk, looming over Eleanor, his arms folded. ‘I'm not leaving here unless you tell me everything.'

There were three kitchen hands, each a head taller than Danyl, all lean and heavily muscled. They held him up by his arms and legs and carried him face down through the hall and out the door. ‘Are you going to leave quietly?' one of them asked Danyl, who swallowed and nodded. The kitchen hand said, ‘Set him down nice and easy.' They swung him to his feet and steadied him as he found his balance. ‘Don't come back,' the same kitchen hand said, in a tone that was both friendly and heavy with implicit violence.

‘Danyl.' Eleanor was in the doorway. Her arms were folded; the flaps of her dressing gown whipped in the breeze.

‘I really don't know where Verity is,' she said. ‘She's disappeared. That's what she does. She left her home, and then me, and now you. I know you don't believe me. You think I'm your enemy, and that everything I do has some sinister motive.' She shrugged. ‘It's true that I never liked you. You were bad for Verity. You were a sick guy. When I heard you were getting treatment, taking medication, I was glad for you. You needed help. And now here you are, back in Te Aro raving about farms and spiral patterns and scientists, and looking for Verity. But she's gone. There is no mystery. There is no plot. Forget about Verity, and this valley, and whatever you think is happening here.' She pointed to the beginning of Aro Street, where it connected with the rest of the Capital: he saw lit buildings, cars and pedestrians on the roads. ‘Go now,' she urged him. ‘Leave this valley. Go back to your doctors. Your treatment. Get out while you can.'

Danyl walked up the hill on the north side of the valley, heading for Steve's house. This was a cottage located in a narrow gully accessible only via a near-vertical ascent of Devon Street. It was still raining; still cold. He took many breaks as he walked up the steep and winding way. He huddled in burnt-out garages, or beneath crumbling walls scoured with graffiti and weeds, panting to catch his breath, and he thought over Eleanor's parting words.

When Danyl first went on his medication he worried that the powerful mood-altering drugs would take away his identity, his free will; turn him into a happy, obedient zombie; destroy the real Danyl. Enslave him. But when they started to work and his depression dissolved he realised that the previous Danyl —Unmedicated Danyl—wasn't free. He was sick, horribly sick, and the drugs had cured him. The new Medicated Danyl was the free Danyl. The real Danyl. Once a lowly grub, now transformed into a beautiful, soaring but heavily drugged butterfly.

Unfortunately that feeling didn't last. Medicated Danyl was calm Danyl. Controlled Danyl. Temperate Danyl, who felt no highs or lows. Medicated Danyl never burst into tears when the sensors for the automatic doors at the supermarket failed to detect him, but neither did he roar with laughter when something truly hilarious happened, like seeing a stranger walk face first into the doors at the supermarket after they failed to open for them. The most pleasure Medicated Danyl ever took from life was an amused smile. After a few months of calm and sanity, Danyl realised he missed Unmedicated Danyl. Maybe that was the real Danyl after all?

Now, after a week of being Unmedicated Danyl again, Danyl felt very real. But what if he was deluding himself? What if Eleanor was right and Unmedicated Danyl was psychotic Danyl? And, if that was so, which Danyl was the real Danyl? How could he tell?

These thoughts troubled him as he panted and gasped his way up the hill, gritting his teeth and leaning into the wind. Eventually he reached the great bend in Devon Street. To his left the road curved around and continued up the hill and out of the valley. To the right the slope dropped away, descending to a narrow gully. He looked down on the dismal collection of damp sunless houses below, the most wretched and lichen-encrusted of which was Steve's.

It was mid-morning, about 10.30. But the sunlight did not reach the lower depths of the gully. Ever. It was a region of shadow and mould.

Steve's house was a small single-storey box: an old cottage with peeling paint and curtains covering the windows. It was reached via a long, crooked wooden staircase. The steps were loose concrete bricks: they were slick with slime.

As Danyl descended, making his way deeper into the gloom, he saw the yard. One of the terms of Steve's tenancy was that he keep the garden neat and well-tended and free of weeds, and Steve's response to this burden was to routinely spray the entire property with industrial defoliant. The result was a bland expanse of mud surrounding the entire house, extending to the fences on all sides, broken only by the skeletons of dead trees. A path of churned ooze led from the bottom of the steps to Steve's front door. When Danyl reached it he noted that there were many different footprints embedded in the mire: different shoes, boots, different sizes. They all looked recent. Steve's front door was ajar.

Steve would never leave his front door open. And why were dozens of footprints leading to his house? Would dozens of people visit Steve? No. Never. Danyl stopped halfway to the open door and called out, ‘Hello?'

No answer. Maybe Steve was sleeping? He slept for about eighteen hours a day so this wasn't unlikely. Danyl knocked on the door. The house creaked. Water dripped from the gutters overhead. He touched the door with his fingertips. It swung inwards.

Steve had entered Danyl's life one fine summer morning at the German Bakery on Aro Street. It was Verity's birthday, so Danyl took her out for breakfast. They sat by the window and ate apple tarts and drank black coffee. When they finished their pastries, Verity paid at the counter then went to the bathroom. Danyl glanced through the newspaper, and when he looked up a moment later a stranger sat opposite him.

Before he could speak, the stranger reached across the table and grabbed Danyl's hand. ‘Don't get up,' he said in a low but cheerful tone. ‘Keep smiling. Pretend we're friends having a nice, normal chat.'

He was a man of average height and average build. He was dressed identically to Danyl in old black jeans and a faded grey T-shirt. His head was shaved; the contours of his skull were pleasing to the eye. His smile was warm and open. He had dimples in his cheeks and laugh lines around his eyes. He looked like a crafty, dissolute Buddha trying to scam his way to enlightenment.

Danyl frowned at the fingers grasping his wrist and asked, ‘Who are you?'

‘We don't have much time,' the stranger replied. ‘Let's not play games. I know who you are, you know who I am.'

‘I have no idea who you are.'

‘I'm the guy who is about to blow your mind'—the stranger released Danyl's hand and briefly mimed his head exploding—‘with the truth. Your name is Clive.'

‘My name is Danyl.'

Steve considered this information for a few seconds, then replied. ‘Listen, Donald. Do you ever have the feeling that the world is not as it seems? That there's a deeper reality, a hidden reality all around us, but that something or someone is concealing the truth from us?'

‘I think everyone feels that,' Danyl replied, having heard these ideas many times since his arrival in Aro Valley. ‘But I think that paranoia about the nature of reality is really just a coping mechanism. Reality is what it is, but it's so chaotic and complex our minds struggle to comprehend it. So we invent these conspiracies to tell ourselves that there's a deeper simplicity. It's more comforting than accepting the truth, which is that our world is random and meaningless.'

‘Exactly. Well said.' The stranger smiled then leaned across the table. ‘The real question is this,' he whispered. ‘Who is making us paranoid and why? What are they trying to conceal?'

‘That's not—'

‘What if I told you I had proof of a conspiracy?' He took a folder filled with papers and photographs from his backpack. ‘A massive conspiracy that stretches across space and time? A conspiracy operating right here within Aro Valley. A conspiracy that your girlfriend Verity might be involved with? A plot against reality itself?'

Danyl thought for a second. ‘I would be intrigued,' he replied. ‘But also completely disbelieving.'

‘Disbelieve this.' The stranger flipped to the middle of the folder, then glanced in the direction of the bathroom. ‘Tell me, what is you think your girlfriend does after she leaves the house in the morning?'

‘She goes to work at an art gallery.'

‘Oh? Does she?' He smirked knowingly. ‘And was she at work yesterday at 1.15 pm?'

‘She was probably on her lunchbreak.'

‘Indeed. And do you know where she went for this lunchbreak?'

Danyl nodded cautiously. ‘She said she went to the library.'

‘She did,' the stranger said. ‘But the real question is: what did she do there?'

‘Got some books out?'

‘Correct. And what books did she get?'

‘I don't know,' Danyl said.

‘Ha! So she doesn't tell you everything.'

‘She told me. I just wasn't paying attention.'

‘I have a colleague at the library,' the stranger continued. ‘He keeps an eye on things for me. Tells me who is reading the wrong books. Researching the wrong subjects. Finding the wrong answers.'

‘Is that legal? What about people's privacy?'

‘What about the books' privacy?' the stranger demanded. ‘What about the right of knowledge never to be known? Take a look at this printout of all the books your girlfriend borrowed yesterday. Tell me what you see.' He slid the printout across the table.

Danyl read the list. ‘These are mostly art history texts.'

‘And?'

‘Verity is an artist. A photographer.'

‘Keep reading.'

‘The rest are mostly cookbooks.'

‘Indeed,' said the stranger. ‘And it gets worse. Look at the last entry on the list.'

‘Emanuel Swedenborg's
Journal of Dreams
.' Danyl looked at the stranger. ‘So what?'

‘Do you know who Swedenborg was?'

‘Wasn't he some kind of Swedish mystic?'

‘Emanuel Swedenborg,' the stranger replied, ‘was the greatest psychic in the western tradition. In 1741, when he was in his mid-fifties, he was a world renowned physicist. He was at the height of his scientific career. Then he began to have visions. He manifested astonishing psychic powers. He documented the first of these visions in his
Journal of Dreams
. On this page'—he produced a photocopied document—‘Swedenborg described a luminous pathway spiralling up through the stairs towards heaven with groups of angels ascending and descending it. Now …' He smiled reassuringly. ‘I bet you're wondering what the visions of a Swedish mystic who lived three hundred years ago have to do with why I follow your girlfriend around on her lunchbreak?'

Danyl nodded.

‘Look at the top of the list,' the stranger continued. ‘She's also borrowed a book about William Blake.'

‘That crazy poet?'

‘He was a poet,' the stranger admitted. ‘But Blake was also Britain's greatest visual artist.'

‘What about William Turner?'

‘Any idiot can paint a steamship on fire in the mist, Danyl. No. Blake was the master. He was heavily influenced by Swedenborg, so we shouldn't be surprised by this.' He slid a reproduction of a Blake watercolour across the table. It showed an impossible spiral stairway, rising up through the stars, that was populated by graceful figures, some of them winged, carrying vases or baskets or children. The stairway terminated in a distant, radiant sun. ‘
Jacob's Ladder
, painted by Blake circa 1806. Very different from the path to heaven described in the Book of Genesis, but identical to Swedenborg's vision. The painting is obviously based on it. How do you explain that?'

‘I guess Blake read Swedenborg's journal,' Danyl replied. He found himself enjoying the stranger's torrent of nonsense. His life had been very quiet of late: Eleanor had moved out; Verity spent all of her time working on her new photography exhibition: a secret project of which he knew nothing. Danyl himself had been trying to finish writing his novel, but he spent more and more of his days asleep. This stranger's babble was like rain in a drought, and he delivered it with such a confident cheerful air. Danyl should have been alarmed that this deluded man was stalking Verity and recording her movements, but the stranger's merry eyes made it all seem harmless, even fun. ‘Blake painted his painting based on the passage in the journal,' Danyl continued. ‘But now you'll claim that he didn't.'

‘You're right,' the stranger replied. ‘In that you were totally wrong.' He stabbed the painting with his finger. ‘The journal Swedenborg recorded this vision in was never published during his lifetime. It was lost until a century after his death. A researcher stumbled upon it hidden away in the Royal Library of Stockholm, in 1854. Twenty-seven years after Blake died. According to the memoirs of Blake's friend William Varley, Blake saw this spiral stairway in a vision, just like Swedenborg. Two men, decades and countries apart, both imagined and depicted this same unique image. If we asked either of them to explain this, they'd talk about revelation, about divine inspiration. But we'—Steve waved his hand, encompassing Danyl and himself—‘we are men of the world. We don't believe in such superstitions. But then how do we explain this mystery?'

‘Coincidence?'

The stranger smiled indulgently, then his expression turned serious. ‘There are many of these coincidences throughout human history. Too many to be a coincidence.' He leaned closer. ‘These manifold visions have an origin. An author. What is their agenda? All art and all storytelling has the same purpose. To manipulate the audience. But here the audience is all of humanity. Something wants to influence our thoughts. The development of our civilisation. The destiny of our species. But who? And why? I believe that your girlfriend'—He tapped the list of Verity's library books—‘is involved in this plot. I don't know if she's an outsider, like myself, or one of the puppet-masters ringleading from behind the curtain. I want you to help me find out.'

‘If our thoughts are being manipulated by someone unknown,' Danyl asked, warming to the subject, ‘then how do you know you aren't being manipulated right now?'

The stranger clicked his fingers and pointed at Danyl. ‘That is a very perceptive question,' he replied. ‘How indeed?' He said this again, softly, to himself. He opened his folder, flipped through the remaining papers inside it, then paused and licked his lips. ‘After all, my own thoughts … I could be part of the plot, and I wouldn't even …' He trailed off then, and after a minute of silence he coughed and announced, ‘I have to go now.' He took the library list and photocopies and stuffed them into his folder, which he tucked under his arm. Then he stood. ‘Don't speak of any of this to Verity. Keep an eye on her. Monitor her for unusual behaviour. Don't tell her anything. I'll be in touch.' He hurried out of the bakery and ran across the road.

Verity returned from the bathroom. She watched the stranger vault the wall to Aro Park, catch his foot on the lip and fall out of sight behind it. She said, ‘Was that man sitting in my seat?'

‘Yes.' Danyl finished the last of his tea.

‘Who is he?' Verity picked up her handbag. ‘What's his name?'

‘Steve!'

Danyl stood in the unlit hall. It ran all the way through Steve's house. There were five doors leading off it: the back door was open, leading into the backyard. The other four led to the bedroom, lounge, kitchen and bathroom: they were all closed. Danyl paused on the threshold, sniffing the air.