Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (12 page)

Danyl looked up and saw stars.

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:

Te Aro Threshold Development! Experience life

as it's meant to be lived—at the Threshold!

Beneath this was an artist's rendition of a series of handsome townhouses foregrounded by a picture of a half-naked man and woman lying on a bed, smiling towards the sunrise. The bottom third of the billboard showed a tree-lined driveway winding through landscaped gardens followed by the slogan
Come LIVE … beyond the Threshold!

The Threshold development was part of Te Aro lore: one of the great mysteries of the valley. It was a housing project planned back in the 1970s. When it was announced that a large, wooded section of the valley would be bulldozed and subdivided to make way for dozens of townhouses offering modern solutions to inner-city living, Te Aro rose up in open revolt. There were protests, candlelit vigils, Sanskrit prayers chanted in the paths of bulldozers, naked demonstrators screaming anarchist slogans dragged away by bewildered police and, finally, a legendary, drug-fuelled dance party held amidst the fallen trees beneath a luminous full moon.

After that, the trees were hauled away. Construction on the townhouses began, and then, suddenly, stopped. No one knew why. Huge fences went up around the half-developed land; guard dogs prowled the unsealed roads and unfinished buildings. The Threshold protests entered into legend but the location of the place itself slipped away, forgotten. No one even knew where it was anymore. Danyl had stumbled into the one place in the valley where there was no one to help him. Even if he had the strength to cry out, no one would hear, no one would come. He'd reached a dead end.

He crumpled and fell face down on the road. He used his last flicker of strength to roll onto his back. Each breath was a little shorter. Each heartbeat a little weaker. In a voice that wasn't triumphant at all but rather friendly and sympathetic, the voice said, See? This dying business isn't so bad. It's just darkness and numbness and silence, and what's so terrible about that? Danyl was inclined to agree.

There wasn't absolute silence, of course. There was the wind. The trees. Water dripping. The rush of cars on distant roads. And there was another sound beneath all those. An odd babble, almost voice-like. It surged briefly when the wind died down, then another gust swept it away.

Danyl put it out of his mind. He didn't have to know everything.

It's nothing, the voice agreed. Hush now. Close your eyes.

Danyl closed his eyes. He breathed out. He did not breathe in again.

The water dripped. The trees rustled. The starlight poured down on him as he lay on the gravel road, his arms outstretched, his face at peace. And then the wind died away and the sound came back, sharp and clear in the frozen air.

The soft, nervous clucking of chickens.

Danyl's arrival caused quite a stir amongst the birds. The half-finished, half-ruined townhouse was three storeys high with a peaked roof, built in the Victorian style with fake shutters next to the windowless frames and fake plaster arches over the three front doors. When he first crawled around the back of the building and discovered the coop—a row of straw-lined cardboard boxes set against the rear wall of the townhouse—the chickens rushed over to Danyl and clustered about him, clucking and burbling as he crawled through the weeds and mud, heading towards the nearest door.

Because the chickens meant life. They meant someone lived in the unfinished building, or at least nearby, and they could save Danyl. Or, alternately, if there wasn't anyone around he could use the chickens themselves for warmth. He cast an appreciative eye over their plump, feathered bodies as they milled about.

The chickens also meant Verity was near. Danyl may have been mentally ill and very close to death but he wasn't stupid. He knew that the gravel path and the clucking chickens of Threshold were the same gravel and chickens he'd heard on Verity's voice message. He'd figured that out, eventually, and that had spurred him to start breathing again, roll over and crawl his way up the hill. Now that he'd rounded the back of the townhouse he saw further evidence of habitation. There were bloated rubbish bags stacked in a pile, and a makeshift washing line strung up between two trees midway to the next building, with sheets and clothes forming motionless black shapes suspended in the air.

Three more doors along the back wall were at waist height above the ground with no steps leading to them. The door Danyl crawled towards had a small pile of rocks beneath it. He slithered over the rocks and pulled himself onto his knees, fumbled at the doorknob and fell forward as the door swung inwards.

The interior was almost as black as the tunnels beneath the valley. The starlight cast a vague wash of illumination across a smooth concrete floor. At the periphery of the light was a woman asleep on a mattress piled high with blankets. Her head was turned away, facing the darkness.

Danyl moaned with relief. He'd made it. He'd found someone. He pulled himself through the doorway and rasped in his dying voice, ‘Help me.'

The woman did not move.

Danyl decided to make his plea a little louder. He shuffled closer and croaked, ‘Hey! I'm dying.' She still did not respond. His wet clothes left a damp trail on the ground as he crawled to the mattress and shook the woman's shoulder. Her head rolled to face him and he gasped.

It was Joy. The woman Danyl had met in the alleyway. The giant's girlfriend. She was blindfolded. Her lips were stained bright blue. There was a mattress beyond her with another sleeping form in it, and as Danyl's eyes adjusted to the gloom, more blindfolded forms materialised. They were spaced a few metres from each other, and the bodies receded into the darkness.

Danyl had never been so happy to find a vast room filled with blindfolded comatose bodies. He stripped off his soaking clothes and dried himself with a blanket. He found the two largest men he could find and tugged their mattresses together, then slipped under the blankets between them. His plan was to lie there tucked up with the men until they raised his core temperature. He'd wait until his teeth stopped chattering and his heart worked properly again instead of skipping beats and madly fluttering as if were trying to wriggle free of his ribcage. After that, he'd make his escape.

He woke with a start. It was day. The room was lit by shafts of sunlight coming in through cracks in the walls.

Danyl had dreamed of a black river and a derelict house filled with bodies; he took a few seconds to sort out that those dreams were actually memories and that he was inside a huge house and surrounded by drugged, unconscious people.

He wriggled free of his companions, sat up and looked around. The interior of the townhouse was a vast continuous space. Most of the internal walls and the floors of the higher storeys were just supporting beams, so he could see all the way to the far end of the building. Rows of regularly spaced windows admitted identical shafts of grey light; they illuminated dozens of mattresses, each occupied by a motionless sleeper buried under a pile of blankets.

The floor was freezing. Danyl stole a pair of socks off one of the men he'd spent the night with and then prowled around stealing bits of warm clothing off different people until he was properly dressed. None of the sleepers had shoes on. He found all their footwear piled in a remote corner of the townhouse and picked out a pair of sneakers in his size.

All this time, the chickens watched him from the doorway. He walked over to them and found a makeshift kitchen set up against the back wall. There was a stone jug filled with water, a camping stove on the windowsill, and on the floor was a box containing tea bags, instant coffee, sugar sachets and milk powder. He boiled water and made tea. He sat on the porch and watched the sunrise. The chickens gathered around him, and he felt as though they were celebrating his survival. It had been close.

The light behind the low grey clouds intensified. The darkness shrank into shadows and the desolate landscape of Threshold revealed itself. It was a wide slope ringed by tree-lined ridges and enclosed by a high wooden fence. The top of the slope was hidden in a bank of mist. The other unfinished townhouses loomed over the patches of weeds and pools of mud that lay between them. These spaces were littered with abandoned building materials: rusting girders, piles of stones. Narrow muddy paths criss-crossed the wasteland.

The road swept back and forth across the slope, passing out of sight into the mist. As Danyl peered up into the bank of fog he saw a faint yellow light shining somewhere high above, its source concealed in the grey haze. There was someone up there. Someone was home.

He remembered Verity's voice message: the timeline of background sounds. She'd walked past the chickens, along the gravel road for several minutes, then up a flight of steps. There were no steps around here. Verity must have gone up the hill: towards the light.

Danyl looked back over his shoulder at the building filled with sleeping bodies. He looked up at the light again. Then he looked at the chickens, shook his head and said, ‘I'm not going up there. It's not worth it. I almost died down in those tunnels. I shouldn't even be here. I'm leaving this valley. I'm going back to my medication. My doctor.' The lead chicken tipped its head to one side. Danyl held up his hand. ‘I know what you're going to say. That if I leave now I'll never understand anything. The blue envelope. Gorgon. The Real City.' He gestured at the rows of bodies. ‘This place. I'll never know what happened to Verity. And you're right. But I can live with not knowing if it means I get to live. So—goodbye.'

The chickens warbled sadly. They followed Danyl to the edge of the building, some of them running on ahead, and it was the change in intensity of their clucking that warned him something was wrong. He knelt down and peeked around the corner.

A procession of people in shabby, ill-fitting clothes emerged from the ground at the base of the hill, springing forth like flowers in stop-motion footage. They were coming out of the culvert. They were coming from the catacombs.

The procession reached the road. It moved slowly. Each pair carried a stretcher between them. On each stretcher was a body. They were too far away for Danyl to make out individual features of the bodies, but he could see blue stains around their mouths: fragments of sky amidst the mud and drifts of mist. One of the bodies had a thick beard and wore a red velvet dress.

The procession ended with a final, lone figure emerging from the tunnel. This person wasn't carrying a stretcher. She was dressed in a chef's outfit with a plastic raincoat over it. It was Eleanor.

Danyl hid behind the far wall, silencing the chickens with a finger to his lips. He knelt in the grass and looked back down the hill. The procession turned off the gravel road and made for the nearby townhouse; all except for Eleanor, who continued up the hill, heading for the vague patch of light in the mist.

Danyl couldn't stay here. It was too exposed. And he couldn't circle around and go back into the catacombs. Who knew what lurked down there. Cultists? Giants? It was too dangerous.

He made his way to a row of low trees and lay in the grass behind them. He would watch and wait. When things were quiet again, he'd make for safety.

The gravel road wound down the hill and out of sight, heading towards two large tree-covered ridges. Danyl recalled a remote section of Raroa Road with a tall wooden gate stretching between two steep spurs, with hills on both sides. That had to be the exit, where the track came out and the Threshold development connected with the rest of the valley. He'd break for the gate, climb over it and flee Te Aro itself—forever.

The procession reached the townhouse. Danyl watched them through the windows. The first pair entered, laid their stretcher down and transferred its drugged occupant to a mattress. When the pair had finished, they turned to face the back of the building. Danyl recognised them. Sophus and the Goatman.

He cast his mind back to the chaotic scenes in the catacombs. What did Steve say before he kicked the plank into the stream? Something about maps. Explorers … Cartographers. He'd called Sophus and the Goatman ‘cartographers'. And that's how they referred to themselves. Sophus had referred to ‘The Apostle' just before he called Eleanor's phone. And their leader was Gorgon—whoever or whatever Gorgon was.

The Cartographers went about their business. The rest of their procession unloaded the bodies from the stretchers. They stripped their lower bodies; removing trousers and underwear; next they tore open gigantic bags of adult nappies and tugged them on to their half-naked victims. They did the same to the rest of the comatose forms spaced out across the room, moving from mattress to mattress, tugging soiled nappies off and putting clean ones on. Danyl could hear their expressions of disgust chiming out through the still, misty air of the dawn.

Then one of them cried out in surprise. Danyl couldn't see why: his view was blocked. The rest of the Cartographers were moving towards the section of the building where Danyl had slept the night before. Then the Goatman stepped into view, holding up the damp, torn clothes Danyl had discarded when he'd crawled into the townhouse. Sophus hurried over to them. He held a trouser leg to the light, inspecting it. He shouted and gestured to Cartographers, pointing at the exits. The Cartographers dropped their soiled nappies and obeyed.

Danyl backed away through the scrub, keeping to his hands and knees until he figured there were enough trees between him and the townhouse to mask his escape. Then he ran.

It was no good heading towards the gate. The Cartographers would guard it. He'd have to head up and try to make his way over the hill. He found a trail through the trees heading in the right direction. The shouts of his hunters rang out. They sounded far away.

Danyl ran on through the trees, heading up the slope to where he hoped the fence would intersect with the ridgeline. Something glinted through the foliage: coils of wire. The fence! Freedom. He ran towards it.

The fence was made of wooden vertical slats and steel poles and topped with rows of barbed wire slanting outwards at a diagonal angle. It wasn't going to be easy to climb over. The best way would be to climb a tree and jump from a branch to the fence-top.

Danyl looked around for such a tree. He clambered up a small bank adjacent to the fence, trying to get a good view, and from it he looked up to the plateau at the top of the hill. This was a level expanse of weeds, about the size of a single car park, and in the centre of the expanse was a large wooden cross sticking out of a rectangle of freshly churned mud. It looked an awful lot like a grave.

Danyl thought back to Verity's message to Eleanor, her final words:
I might never see you again. I'm sorry. Goodbye
.

He looked back at the fence. Not far from him was a sturdy-looking tree with a branch leading directly to it. He could climb it now. Run down to Aro Street. Jump on the next bus. Be free. But what if that grave was Verity's? Could he live the rest of his life never knowing if she had died here and now lay in a shallow grave in the forgotten wilds of Te Aro?

He jogged up to the plateau. It looked out over a region of sunlit mist. A wind had sprung up and it drove the drifts of vapour back and forth across the hillside, concealing then revealing the entire expanse of Threshold. Six derelict buildings staggered up the slope. A group of Cartographers milled about at the bottom of the hill. They were tiny and distant. They hadn't seen him yet.

Danyl approached the grave. It was a makeshift affair. A rough pit in the clay. The cross stood at a crooked angle. Something was carved on the crossbeam. Two words. A name.

Danyl drew closer.

And then a huge gust of wind shook the trees and drove the mist apart, revealing the top of the slope which terminated at the bottom of a stone cliff. A house sat at the base of the cliff, looking out over all of Threshold. Danyl had seen that house before. It was in the photograph of Verity's that had hung on the wall of their bedroom.

The house looked older than it did in Verity's picture. The front deck had gone and so had the steps leading up to it. There was now a large scaffolding on the house, and the wooden boards laid across it formed a stairway leading to the front door. Two Cartographers stood guard at the base of the scaffolding.

And there was Eleanor, a tiny figure in a chef's outfit and raincoat, almost at the top of the gravel road. Danyl watched as she made her way past the guards and up the scaffolding steps. The front door opened and a woman emerged. She was small, stooped: she walked with a cane. Her hair was white and tangled. A dog—a great beast of an animal—trotted out onto the scaffolding and stood beside her. The dog was almost as tall as the two women. It looked around the valley, and its eyes seemed to settle on Danyl.

His first instinct was to run. It's just a dog, he told himself, and it's a long way away. Neither of the women had noticed him, and the dog didn't bark. It just stared.

Danyl turned his back on the dog and the vast and desolate Threshold development. He approached the grave, squinting his eyes, trying decipher the name on the cross. The words were tiny. They seemed to blur …

Then he cried out in pain. Something had stabbed him! He clutched at the wound and looked down. A needle-tipped dart about the size of a matchstick was embedded in his chest.

Whimpering, he pulled it out. The tip of the needle was coated in a thin, sticky, sky-blue residue, mixed with his blood. It was the same luminous blue substance he'd seen in the basement.

Leaves rustled. Danyl looked towards the sound.

The Goatman. His yellow eyes were gleaming; he grinned in triumph with his broad buck teeth. He held a dart-gun in his stumpy, hairy hand. He tugged at the pump on the back of the gun, re-coiling the spring. He took another step towards Danyl, aimed, and fired. A second dart slammed into Danyl's belly, which quivered under the shock of the impact.

Danyl staggered backwards. He needed to run; perhaps he could outdistance the Goatman and get to the fence? He could still escape, dammit. But his legs weren't working, weren't responding to commands from his brain. Or was his brain at fault? He wasn't wasn't sure. He tried to turn, but his balance was gone. He toppled sideways, landing on his side in the soft soft mud. He couldn't move. Couldn't speak. There was something something wrong with him. His brain wasn't working working properly properly anymore. He'd been drugged drugged by the mysterious blue blue substance.

The Goatman loomed in Danyl's vision. His voice was a distant echo. Danyl heard scattered words. ‘The Spiral. Gorgon. The Real City.' The voice surged to a roar then faded to nothing.

Reality drained away like raindrops down a window, and Danyl saw what was behind it.