Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (6 page)

Danyl backed down the alleyway. He felt very nervous. If a beautiful woman could disappear here in a matter of seconds then so, logically, could he. He eyed the high walls, the dripping gutters, the bins, and then turned and ran back to Aro Street.

But as soon as he stepped onto it a car rounded the corner. It moved slowly, with no lights on. One of Eleanor's kitchen hands drove it; Eleanor herself sat in the passenger seat scanning the road.

Danyl dropped to the ground beside a mound of twigs and leaves clogging a stormwater drain, ducked his head and tried to look like debris. The car rolled by, tyres whispering on the wet road. When it was a safe distance away he looked up. He watched the car continue past the park and round the curve in the road, out of sight.

But she'd be back. Where could he go? The streets weren't safe, but neither was the alleyway. He needed to get out of sight, inside a building somehow. He needed sanctuary.

The lights were on in the offices behind Aro Community Hall. Danyl hid behind a tree watching the pathway for a few minutes, making sure the way was clear. Then he ran to the office, crouched below the window and peered over the rim. Yes. Ann the treasurer was there. Alone at her desk, her back to the window, papers spread before her.

He tapped on the rain-streaked glass. She looked up, surprised, then smiled at him and held up a finger signalling him to wait. She gathered all the papers on her desk, shuffled them into a stack and locked them in a drawer. Finally she rose to admit him.

He explained everything to her, more or less. He told her about the alleyway and Joy the drug dealer, and that an evil Taoist cook was searching the streets for him. He didn't bother to mention the fire, or Eleanor's cellphone. Ann listened, absorbing everything.

‘You said you'd help me find Verity,' he said when he'd finished his story, ‘and give me a place to stay.'

‘My offer still stands, of course,' Eleanor replied. ‘If we are not bound by what we say, we are bound by everything we don't say.'

Danyl thought about this, blinking rapidly, then he said, ‘Do you think Joy's disappearance is linked to what happened to your mathematics student? And your colleagues? And Verity?'

Ann stood. She motioned at Danyl. ‘Follow me.'

She led him to a window at the back of the office. It looked out on a tiny concrete space walled off by council buildings. She pointed at a door in the opposite wall and said. ‘That's the Scholar's Cottage. It's where my student—Sophus—lived until his disappearance.'

‘Cottage?' Danyl peered through the gloom. ‘It looks more like a small shed.'

‘The term “cottage” is aspirational,' Ann explained. ‘Also, it comes with a fern. The last time I saw Sophus was three weeks ago. We talked right there.' She pointed at her desk. ‘Sophus claimed he was close to a breakthrough in his work. The answer, he said, was here in the Aro Valley. He explained that he'd been studying mathematical patterns hidden in the valley itself.'

Danyl asked, ‘What kind of patterns?'

‘Secrets embedded in posters for missing animals. Graffiti on the walls. The distribution of shoes tossed over power lines. I told him he was rambling. That he sounded crazy. He apologised and said he hadn't slept for days. We agreed to talk again the next morning. I went back to my work.' Ann gestured at the cottage. ‘About an hour later I glanced out the window and saw him in the courtyard catching rain in a pan. Then he went to go back inside, but stopped when he saw something poking out from under his doormat. A blue envelope. He opened it and looked inside it. Then he went into his cottage. I never saw him again.'

‘Joy mentioned a blue envelope. And something about a labyrinth.'

‘Yes.' Ann frowned, thinking, then turned to Danyl. ‘You said she was muttering something when she entered the alley. Can you remember what?'

‘I think it was a number,' Danyl replied. He concentrated, remembering. ‘One three seven,' he said. ‘I think it was one three seven. Could that be an address? Does it mean anything to you?'

‘It means something,' Ann said, her voice grave. ‘Oh yes. It confirms all of my worst fears. We're dealing with mystics.'

‘Is one three seven a mystical number?'

‘In a way. One divided by 137 is the approximate value of the fine structure constant of the universe.'

‘The what?'

‘The electromagnetic coupling constant.' Ann saw the blank incomprehension on Danyl's face. ‘Let me explain.' She pointed to the light in the courtyard, glowing softly through the drizzle, illuminating the door to the Scholar's Cottage. ‘You see that light?' she said. ‘You know how it works?'

‘Not exactly. Electricity, somehow? Actually, not at all.'

‘It's very simple. Electrons in a high-energy state travel through the wires. When they reach the filament in the light bulb, they drop into a low-energy state and when they do that they release a photon. Trillions of photons stream out of those bulbs every second. They bounce around the room changing slightly as they come into objects with different colours and properties until they bounce into our eyes and bind to a new electron in a photoreceptor that sends a signal to our brain.'

Danyl looked at the light. He said, ‘Huh.' He felt a little ashamed. All his life he'd been seeing things, yet he had no idea how seeing worked.

‘At the beginning of the twentieth century, physicists wondered about the strength of the interaction between electrons and photons. It's not difficult to calculate.' She wrote an equation on the condensation of the window with her fingertip. ‘It's the charge of the proton divided by the quantum of action multiplied by the speed of light in a vacuum. When we solve this equation we get this number, which physicists call the fine structure constant, which is about 1/137. Now, normally when you carry out equations in physics, you end up with a number and a unit. The speed of light gives you a distance that you can travel over time, and you can measure that in miles, or kilometres, or whatever you want. The photon charge gives you the strength of the charge, and physicists like to measure that using a unit called coulombs. But when you calculate the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, something interesting happens. You get this number'—she pointed to 1/137—‘but no unit. No matter how you measure the other variables in the equation, it will always return this specific number. It's a dimensionless constant hidden away in the deep structure of the universe. Now, here's where it gets strange.'

Danyl nodded and said, ‘Huh' again.

‘Where did this number come from?' Ann spread her fingers. ‘No one knows. Einstein wondered if God had any choice in the way He designed the universe. Could He have built it differently, or is this universe in which we exist the only viable option? Of course, there is no God. That's a false metaphysical premise. But it turns out that if the fine structure constant was slightly larger than it is, there would be no carbon in our universe and probably no intelligent life. If it was smaller, you wouldn't get star formation and the universe would be a cold, dead, lifeless place. So this number'—she pointed again—‘must have this exact value, because if it didn't we wouldn't be able to observe it. Philosophers call this “the fine-tuning problem”: why does the universe seem like it's been designed to allow the existence of intelligent life?'

Danyl asked, ‘What's the answer?'

‘No one knows. That's what Sophus was working on before he got distracted studying scraps of paper he found in the gutters of Te Aro. He wanted to solve the tuning problem by enumerating the fine structure constant. If he could relate it to the number of dimensions in the universe, or to some significant mathematical value like pi or the infinite sum, then he could say: “There's no fine-tuning problem because the electromagnetic interaction must have this value. It's all part of a logical framework and not an arbitrary number that just happens to allow the existence of complex life.” Sadly, there are plenty of lunatics out there who try to link the fine structure constant to codes in the Bible, or the secrets of the Illuminati. That must be how whoever is behind these disappearances snared Sophus.'

‘What do we do next?'

‘We search that alleyway,' Ann replied. ‘First thing tomorrow, after we've slept. And if we don't find anything, we need to track down one of these blue envelopes and see what's inside it.'

‘Do you think that's safe?' Danyl asked. ‘Joy and Sophus saw inside their envelopes and they disappeared.'

‘They were weak,' Ann assured him. ‘Sophus was young and confused. Your drug dealer was on drugs. But you and I … our minds are robust. Powerful. Don't shake your head.' She reached out and took his arm. She smiled at him, and some long dormant region of Danyl's brain fluttered. ‘Don't underestimate yourself. You've only been back in the valley for one day and you've pinpointed the location of the disappearances and revealed the nature of our enemy. You're better and stronger than you think. Perhaps all those others vanished because, on some level, they wanted to. But not us.' She met his gaze. Her eyes were clear and black and deep. ‘You and I will not disappear.'

The next morning, Ann was gone.

She'd ordered Danyl to meet her at her office at 8 am, but he slept in a little so it was 11.30 before he emerged from the Scholar's Cottage, where he'd spent the night.

The cottage was a tiny space containing a single bed, a desk and a dead fern. Posters of mathematicians covered the walls. At least, Danyl assumed they were mathematicians. They were black-and-white portrait photos of elderly bearded men with bulging eyes. Danyl was too tired to undress when he went to bed; he just collapsed, face down under their bulbous gaze.

When he woke he burrowed under the blankets for a while, warm and drowsy and happy and safe; not quite remembering where he was but content to be there. Then the events of the previous day came back to him unbidden: Steve's empty house, the alleyway, the fire. He realised he was not safe. He was in Te Aro. People were disappearing and he needed to find Verity and get out of the valley before whatever took them claimed him too.

And he remembered stealing Eleanor's phone. He'd switched it off before he went to bed out of a paranoid notion that Eleanor might be able to track it, somehow, and hunt him down while he slept. He turned it on now and dialled Verity again. Still no answer, and the clock on the display informed him that he was late to meet Ann.

The door to her office was locked. The entire council building was dark and empty. Danyl stood outside it, shivering and hungry, wondering what to do next. Return to the Scholar's Cottage, climb back into bed and wait for Verity to ring or Ann to show up? That seemed like the smart move. But he was hungry and there wasn't any food in the cottage. Also, what if Verity didn't call, and Ann didn't return?

He pressed his nose against the office window. Maybe Ann had left behind some sort of sign, or clue? And that's when he saw it: on her desk, a blue envelope with the top torn open and the contents removed.

He returned to the Scholar's Cottage and climbed back into bed. That wasn't a long-term solution though. He needed to find Verity. Ann had claimed to know where she was, but Ann was gone. She'd opened a blue envelope, taken whatever she'd found inside it, and vanished. She wasn't coming back.

Then Danyl had an idea. His mind flashed back to Joy the drug dealer standing in the alleyway, stoned and bewildered, staring at the graffiti.
I left the blue envelope at home
. He fished through his pockets and found her business card. Yes. Her address was there, and on Norway Street, not far from the Community Hall. So there might be an envelope at Joy's house with the mysterious contents still inside it. Find the envelope. Find Ann. Find Verity.

Danyl bounced up and down on his feet, delighted with his brain's performance. Medicated Danyl never had clever ideas like that. His mind just drifted along, responding to stimuli but never pulling its weight. Now it was back in the game. Danyl felt invigorated. With his brain on his side he felt he could accomplish almost anything. He washed his face in a nearby puddle then headed towards Joy's house, a spring in his step.

The address on the card led him to a flat sunlit section. A concrete path ran across a lawn; steps led onto a wooden porch running along the front of the house, which was a nondescript cream-coloured wooden building with frosted windows and a peaked red roof punctuated by skylights.

Danyl knocked at the door. His stomach rumbled. No one answered, which made sense. Joy had disappeared, after all. She had repeatedly mentioned her boyfriend, though, and Danyl thought this boyfriend might let him in and feed him breakfast then hand over the blue envelope, but apparently not. Perhaps the boyfriend didn't even exist? It was probably just a clumsy way for Joy to signal that she wasn't romantically available to Danyl. But she didn't know about his medically induced impotence, so the joke was on her.

He tried the door. It opened.

That was odd. You'd think a drug dealer would have better home security. Then he pictured Joy drifting out her front door late last night, her eyes glazed over, letting the door swing shut behind her then trailing down the hill towards the alleyway. Still, he hesitated. This wasn't like breaking into Verity's parents' house or Steve's house, or setting fire to Eleanor's kitchen. This was a stranger's home. He knocked again and called out, ‘Hello?'

Still no reply. He stepped into the darkened interior of the drug dealer's house.

It consisted of one very long room separated into different spaces by the arrangement of the furniture. Just inside the front door was the kitchen area with a white tiled floor, segmented off by a dining table atop polished wooden floorboards, then black leather couches facing a large flat-screen television. A Japanese-style divider stretched between a tall wardrobe and a chest of drawers. A door-sized gap in the divider led to an unlit space that had to be the bedroom. Grey light filtered in from evenly spaced skylights.

Danyl began his search in the kitchen. He looked in cupboards, drawers and the refrigerator. When he was finished, he made a breakfast bowl with organic muesli and frozen blueberries. He topped this up with goat's milk, took a spoon from the cutlery drawer and groaned with pleasure when he tasted the first spoonful. Then, chewing and swallowing, he walked to the dining table at the far end of the kitchen.

The kitchen was covered with papers. Danyl walked around it, craning his head to read them all. There were photographs of graffiti, copies of the Te Aro Community Volunteer Newsletter with some sentences underlined, others blacked out. Words scrawled in the margins. Beside the newsletters were graph pages covered with complex algebraic equations. The number 1/137 was at the bottom of one of the pages, underlined and circled with red ink. Also on the table: a large ashtray filled with ash. The reek of cannabis hung heavy in the air.

He rummaged through the mess, but there was no blue envelope. Just beyond the table, though, lay a pile of clothes. Danyl knelt down to inspect them.

Black leather boots. Black jeans. A black T-shirt. That's what Joy was wearing last night in the alleyway. Danyl frowned, thinking. Most people in Te Aro owned multiple black T-shirts and pairs of black jeans. So the pile of clothes on the floor might not mean anything. But it might mean that Joy had reappeared, somehow, and then returned home and taken off her clothes.

His frown deepened. If Joy was here, naked, then it might not be appropriate for Danyl to be in her house, creeping towards her while eating her blueberries.

He called, ‘Hello? Joy? It's me, Danyl. The guy from the alleyway.'

No reply. Danyl ate another spoonful of food and moved deeper into the house.

He passed the couches and TV. The TV sat atop a long, polished wooden shelf filled with books and records. A stereo occupied the far end of the shelves, which were flanked by rectangular speakers. More clothes were scattered on the floor here. Black female undergarments, along with some sort of weird, oversized, bifurcated blanket made of blue denim.

Beyond the lounge stood the dresser and room divider. Danyl walked between them and entered the bedroom. The bed was huge, with a massive, flesh-coloured duvet piled in the centre. He circled it to verify that the bed did not contain a pretty naked girl. There was a narrow door on the side wall near the bed. This led to a bathroom—the only separate room in the house—and he glanced inside it. Danyl had had nasty surprises from bathrooms in the past. But this one was empty.

He turned around, and after a moment he drew in his breath. Lying on the floor just beside the bed was a bright blue envelope. He cried out, ‘Aha!' and stepped towards it. And then the gigantic man sleeping on the bed snorted and stirred.

Danyl froze.
The bed wasn't empty
. The bed wasn't empty! When he checked earlier he'd been looking for a naked girl, so he'd failed to notice that the flesh-coloured, oddly stained duvet was actually a huge, naked, muscular man with a shaved head and tattoos. The huge man coughed and rolled over. The bed groaned under his weight.

Danyl was paralysed with fear. He knew this sensation well. It happened to him a lot, and right now he was roughly in the middle of the fear–paralysis spectrum: he could blink and twitch his fingers, and he did both of these things while the huge man climbed out of bed and stood before him, yawning and scratching his belly, which was covered with tattoos of skulls and roses and eagles and knives. He shouted out, ‘Joy!' Then he walked past Danyl and around the bed, heading for the bathroom, his uncircumcised penis slapping audibly against his leg. He disappeared into the bathroom. Seconds later came the sound of a torrent of urine coursing into the toilet.

Thoughts flapped around Danyl's mind like a plastic bag in the wind. This must be Joy's boyfriend. Why didn't he see Danyl? Why did he walk straight past him? How loud his urination was. His urethra must be huge! And why didn't Danyl see him earlier? A gigantic, dangerous man lying on the bed in plain sight!

Then he understood. When he looked at the bed he'd expected to see a naked girl, not a terrible giant. His brain had filtered the giant out. And the same thing had happened to the giant! He didn't expect to wake up and see Danyl in his bedroom so he walked right by him. Also, the light was bad, and Danyl's jacket blended in with the plaster walls and the murky grey light from the skylight. That was lucky. But his luck wouldn't hold. The giant would eventually stop urinating and walk back into his bedroom. He'd see Danyl and then he'd hurt him. That's what Danyl would do if he found a strange man in his bedroom. If he was capable of hurting anyone, which he wasn't, and if he had his own bedroom, which he didn't.

The blue envelope lay at Danyl's feet. At least he'd found what he came for. All he had to do was grab it then run for the door. He was going to make it.

He knelt down to pick up the envelope but, as he reached for it, he felt an odd little jolt inside his brain. It wasn't painful; it felt like the static charge you get when you touch a hot car or an escalator handle, only it was inside his brain. He shook his head and reached for the envelope again, but his brain jolted once more. What was happening to him?

Danyl's mind flashed back six months to his doctor's office, when he was first prescribed his medication. ‘You may need to take it for the rest of your life,' the doctor warned, waving the little bottle of pills before Danyl's eyes like a hypnotist. ‘If you ever discontinue it, the process must be carefully managed. Otherwise there could be dire consequences. Mood swings. Cognitive disturbances. Irrational behaviour. Maybe even
brain zaps
—sudden shock-like discharges inside your brain.'

Danyl hadn't experienced any mood swings or irrational behaviour, although he reminded himself to look out for them in the future. But this was definitely a brain zap. He gritted his teeth and lunged for the envelope one last time, only to snatch his hand back as his brain jolted him a third time. He hissed in frustration.

Then the roar of the giant's urination stopped. The toilet flushed. Footsteps shook the floor. Danyl scuttled to the bed and dived under it, rolling out of sight just as the tree-trunk-sized legs of the giant came into view.

The giant moved back and forth across the bedroom. He stepped into a pair of fluffy brown slippers. He yelled out ‘Joy!' again.

There was dust under the bed. There was always dust in these situations: Danyl knew not to breathe through his nose but to open his mouth as wide as possible and inhale and exhale, slow and deep. That way he wouldn't sneeze. He could see the blue envelope out of the corner of his eye but he also knew not to reach for it, or even turn his head to look at it. Beds were fine places to hide in theory, but they were often cluttered with forgotten bric-a-brac, and the slightest motion could spring open a suitcase or send an empty wine bottle rolling across the hardwood floors.

He did not move. He waited. He took slow, steady breaths. Things would be OK. The giant would take a shower, eventually, or go outside to look for his girlfriend, and Danyl could make his escape. All he needed to do was keep calm and not make any silly mistakes.

He closed his eyes, turned his head and rested his cheek against the cool floor.

Eleanor's cellphone rang.