Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (14 page)

He learned about feuds. Love affairs. Pacts and betrayals. Yet he was no closer to the secret. It was in here, somewhere. Hidden in some box, sunk deep beneath the paper sea. But he had yet to find a hint. Or maybe he'd found it and passed it over? Maybe there was a story here, but it was too scattered to read.

Steve rearranged the papers into chronological order. Year by year. There were a few ancient, yellowed documents from the 1940s. Then two large piles from the fifties. With the sixties came an explosion of documentation. And the early seventies were even worse.

By then Steve was into his fifth week. His fingers were lacerated with paper cuts and mouse bites. His lungs rattled with mucus—an infection from breathing in the mould that layered the papers at the bottom of the great wave. Steve was on the verge of giving up, of abandoning his dream, when he found his first clue. Or, rather, didn't find it.

1974 was missing.

It manifested as a great gap. A pile of papers from 1973. An even greater pile from 1975. From the year in between: nothing. Not even a community newsletter.

That was strange. Maybe the entire year waited in the great unsorted pile beyond the barricade? But Steve doubted it. Perhaps the secret he was looking for was not information, but the absence of it. Now that he thought back through the tens of thousands of pages and millions of words he'd read since he entered the archive, there were many inexplicable gaps. Pages cut from reports or newsletters. Maps with sections torn from them. Minutes redacted.

Steve had thought this was just random entropy. Mice. Insects. Bureaucrats. Time. But now he saw a pattern. There were clusters of spaces. Someone had gone through and deliberately erased traces of … something. Whatever it was, it began in the early 1970s, and peaked with the redaction of an entire year.

He kept searching, invigorated. A forgotten secret was one thing, but a deliberately concealed secret—a mystery—was the best secret of all. He climbed the barricade. He fought and destroyed the last and greatest of the rats' nests. He found tiny clues: sentences that weren't quite blacked out; shreds of maps; indexes to destroyed reports. Gaps within the gaps. He began to piece things together.

Something had happened in Te Aro in 1974.

It involved a man named Matthias Ogilvy. Ogilvy was a property developer. Politically connected. He bought a large tract of land somewhere in the valley. He worked with the government in the Capital to make great changes to Te Aro. Widen the roads. Build a commercial district. State housing. Tenement buildings. A commercial development on his land. He would upgrade the entire infrastructure to support it all. There was outrage—town meetings, protests—but the plans went ahead anyway. Then, in late 1974, something happened. Someone vanished. Ogilvy cancelled his plans. The government abandoned its urban renewal scheme and the valley remained the way it was.

And there the record ended. Steve continued to search for that one clue that would explain everything or, at least, tell him where to search next. Finally, in his seventh week at the archive, with winter drawing near and rain dripping through holes in the roof, he found it.

It was a box. It had gotten damp at some stage and then dried, and the bottom was wrinkled and warped. Steve could tell just by lifting it that the box was empty.

He opened it anyway and looked inside. There were ink stains on the base, and just at the edge were words transferred from a wet document. Steve turned the box around, trying to make them out, but they were too blurred, too faded. All he could make out were a few words. It was a news story written by a man named Jacob Strawberry, about a place called Threshold.

‘Is there a second archive? A secret archive?'

‘Eh?' The archivist frowned. He sat at his desk in the council building, smoking pot from a cheap plastic bong and watching moon-landing conspiracy videos on the internet. It was late afternoon. The shadows were long. The only other council staffer left in the building was the new treasurer, whispering with her horrible young mathematics student. Steve lowered his voice and leaned closer to the archivist.

‘A woman knocked on the door to the archive today,' he said. ‘A historian. She wanted to do some research.' He held up his hands as the archivist's bloodshot eyes went white with fear. ‘Relax. I told her we'd sprayed the interior of the building for bugs, that it couldn't be re-entered for thirty-six months.'

The archivist relaxed back into his chair. ‘Good lad,' he murmured. ‘Quick thinking.'

‘But then she told me, “The documents I need are in the second Te Aro Archive.” That got me to wondering if we had some kind of … I don't know … second archive?'

The archivist tugged at his goatee. He asked, ‘What did this woman look like?'

‘Medium height,' Steve replied. ‘Inquisitive. Persistent. Troublesome. Brown hair.'

‘What documents did she want?'

‘She wouldn't say.'

‘Did she mention—?' The archivist hesitated. He scrutinised Steve's face, obviously speculating how far he could trust his apprentice. Steve adopted his most cheerful, oblivious grin. Reassured, the archivist asked, ‘Did she mention anything about reality?'

Steve's face remained impassive. ‘Reality. Reality. Let me think. She did … talk about existence a little bit.'

‘Aha.' The archivist snapped his fingers. ‘You were right to bring this to me. Alert me immediately if you see this historian again. And tell no one else of this.'

‘Of course.' Steve glanced over at the treasurer then leaned close to the archivist. ‘Is it true then? Is there a second archive?'

The archivist licked his teeth and said, ‘Of course not.'

Darkness. Rain. Steve.

He hid in the shadow cast by the climbing frame that loomed over the crèche's non-competitive playground. Waiting. Watching.

It didn't take long. The door to the council offices opened and the archivist emerged. He looked about: suspicious, paranoid—but he didn't see Steve. He scuttled over to the Councillor's Chamber and looked about again before slipping a key into the lock. He opened the door and entered.

Steve nodded to himself in grim satisfaction. His theory was correct. The documents missing from the archive hadn't been lost, or destroyed. They'd been hidden in a second, secret archive, and the archivist's fear of Steve's ‘inquisitive historian' had led him right to it.

The archivist wasn't supposed to be in the Councillor's Chamber. No one was. According to the Te Aro Charter, the chamber was inviolate until a new Councillor was elected at the end of the week.

Like most psychologists Steve could move through the darkness without making a sound. He slipped over the crèche fence and across the quad to the lit window. The curtains in the chamber were drawn but they had huge holes in them where moths had eaten their way through, so Steve looked directly into the room.

It had wood-panelled walls and a polished wooden desk. The archivist stood in the corner next to a large closet. He was trying one key after another in the lock. None of them worked. His angry muttering was audible through the glass. Eventually he found the right key and opened the closet, revealing a row of cowboy outfits and, below them, a filing cabinet with a combination lock. He twirled the dial a few times and tried to open it. It didn't budge. He neighed to himself in satisfaction then locked the closet.

Steve slipped away. He walked home, thinking, planning; his hyper-accelerated brain considered all the possibilities. By the time he'd splashed his way down the muddy path to his front door, he knew what he had to do.

Next morning he was late to work.

The archive was now a neat, orderly place. The giant wave of paper was gone. Everything had been arranged: assimilated into the shelves or the great piles of boxes between them. In the centre of the floor was a clear space where Steve had partially assembled a giant aerial map of Te Aro.

He blockaded the door, as always, then set to work. He was trying to complete the map then link the property lots to the location of the land that Ogilvy had once owned. That way he could pinpoint the location of the legendary Threshold development.

This wasn't easy. Everything to do with Ogilvy had been erased or moved to the secret archive. But Steve was finding patterns in the gaps: properties that existed during the 1960s then vanished in the early seventies. He pieced the maps together: yellowed faded aerial photos intersecting with bright satellite imagery. Gradually the entire valley emerged—except for a blank space high up the valley where tree-covered hills crowded around a sloping field that wasn't there, and a remote section of Aro Street that vanished into nothing before reconnecting with another photo and winding up into the gloomy eastern hills. Whatever Threshold was, and whatever happened in it, it was all in that gap; that absence in space and time.

Something moved in the recesses of the archive.

Steve froze. His senses were attuned to the rustling of rodents and insects, but they were all dead now. This was something larger. It came from the far corner.

The archivist materialised out of the gloom and walked towards Steve, who sat cross-legged beside his map. The archivist walked across it, his feet crunching on the ancient papers and photographs.

‘Well, well.' He stood before Steve and folded his arms, waiting. Steve smiled pleasantly and said nothing.

The archivist filled the silence. ‘Nobody knows about the secret archive. The Sheriff knew, but he never breathed a word of it to anyone before he died. The secretary knows the combination to the filing cabinet, but he doesn't know what's in there. So I asked myself, “How would some historian know of its existence?”'

‘There was no historian. I made it up.'

‘Ha!' He pointed an accusatory finger at Steve. ‘You admit it. You lied. I've been checking on you, lad.' He circled Steve, who remained stationary in his cross-legged position. ‘While you've been in here researching'—he spat out the word—‘I've done a little research of my own.' He whipped a piece of paper from the pocket of his blazer and shook it in Steve's face. ‘In the resumé you submitted to the secretary when you applied for this job, you claim to have worked at the The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal. I tried to call them to ask about you, and learned that it was destroyed by a Babylonian army in 700 BC.' He flipped to another page. ‘You supplied a reference from the Antarctic Museum of Indigenous History. I phoned them too, and they'd never heard of you. You're a fraud, Steve. And you can read. You're a stinking, reading literate. Admit it.'

‘It's true.' There was little point in denying it. The archivist clenched his fists and his teeth at Steve's confession.

‘You are dismissed from your position as my apprentice archivist,' he said. ‘You are banned from this building for life, and after the election when we have a new Councillor, I will make it my goal to gain access to the secret archive and burn every document inside it.'

Steve listened to this speech with good-tempered patience. Then he said, ‘I'm sorry I was late this morning.'

‘I don't care about that.' The archivist's yellow eyes flashed. ‘Didn't you hear what I said? You're fired.'

‘Don't you want to know why I took so long to get here?'

‘I don't give a damn.' The eyes narrowed. ‘All right, why?'

‘I was talking to the council secretary. Going through the paperwork.'

‘What paperwork?'

Steve took a photocopied document from his jacket pocket. The archivist snatched it from his hand and scanned it, his eyes flicking back to Steve, until he reached the midpoint of the letter. His pale pink ears flattened against his skull and his nostrils flared. ‘No,' he whispered. ‘You can't.'

‘I'm afraid so,' Steve said. ‘I'm standing for council. And I'm running unopposed. I'm going to be the new Councillor of Te Aro.'

But Steve did not run unopposed. Two more candidates announced their campaigns later that day and that year's battle for Te Aro Council was the fiercest in living memory.

The first of Steve's opponents to declare was Kim, an eminent imaginary languages poet. Kim was a jolly spherical man with shoulder-length grey hair combed very straight and a long, neatly kept moustache and beard worn in the manner of Confucius. Kim was an eloquent speaker in many languages, but none of them were English or, indeed, any other language or dialect known to anyone else on Earth. His campaign posters consisted of Kim's beaming face with the slogan ‘Procks! Terples Mas exterples!' below it in Gothic red lettering.

Steve was confident he could beat Kim. He spent a whole day touring the local businesses, promising them lighter regulations and tax relief, promises he intended to keep if the council ever gained the power to tax or regulate local business. That evening, he gave a speech in Aro Park. It was well attended by many pigeons and several people.

‘People of Te Aro,' he called across the park. A pigeon cooed and a couple having sex under a nearby tree halted their coitus to listen to him. ‘I promise you something wonderful, the one thing that no one else can possibly offer.' He hesitated; a gaggle of curious passersby who had stopped to watch waited as he held up his hand and drew out the silence. ‘I give you …' He touched his fingertips to his chest. ‘Myself. Steve.' Successful political campaigns had catchy slogans, and now Steve's voice rose to a roar as he ended his speech with his carefully crafted phrase. ‘I promise you a sensible, friendly Steve for a sensible, friendly future.'

Scattered applause. Steve bowed and stepped down.

After the speech he talked to a group of young men who were members of a libertarian commune. They were worried about religious persecution. Steve pledged that under him the council would protect them, but if they voted for someone else he could not guarantee their lives. They shook his hand and pledged their votes and moved on.

A good day. Steve felt confident. He would defeat Kim and become Te Aro Councillor. He would see inside the secret archive.

There were four more days until the election.

He had the rest of his campaign mapped out in his head. Tomorrow he would meet the editor of the Te Aro Community Volunteer Newsletter for coffee and tell them—off the record—that Kim was involved in the Holloway Road scandal that inflicted so much damage on the valley. This wasn't true—in fact, Steve was heavily involved in the scandal himself—but Kim's inability to speak English left him defenceless against a smear campaign. Steve rubbed his hands together with glee.

On his way to the Community Hall to see if the secretary had set a time for the election debate, he stopped outside the council offices. Mounted above the doorway was a board listing the date of the election and the names of the candidates. That morning only Steve's name was there. Kim's name had been added at lunchtime. And now there was a third name on the board. A third contender for council. A new opponent.

They called themself Gorgon.

‘It's an outrage!'

Steve leaned over the secretary's desk. The secretary sat in his swivel chair, his face a few centimetres from Steve's. He was unruffled. ‘I don't understand your concern, Steve. Gorgon is a legitimate candidate.'

‘She's not real,' Steve argued. ‘She's a myth. A monster from the valley's collective unconscious. The parents of Te Aro use it to frighten their children. “Do your pranayama breathing meditations or Gorgon will get you.” The candidates for Councillor have to be actual living people. It says so right there in the Charter.' He pointed to the document hanging on the wall behind the secretary's desk. The seventh clause clearly prohibited fictional or imaginary beings from standing for office.

‘But Gorgon is real.'

‘Did Gorgon come to this office? Produce a birth certificate? What did they look like?'

‘I didn't handle that registration,' the secretary replied. ‘The archivist did.' He pointed to the goat-faced man, who sat at his desk watching the exchange, his hands behind his head, his long thin tongue poking out between his teeth. ‘And he verified Gorgon's existence, didn't you, archivist?'

‘That's right, Mr Secretary.' The archivist turned to Steve. ‘Gorgon is real. Verrrry real. You have roused it to anger. Prepare yourselves,' the archivist warned them both, ‘for fates you cannot imagine and suffering beyond comprehension.'

‘You see?' The secretary clapped his palms on his desk. ‘Everything's fine. It's a choice of visions. A contest of ideas. Democracy!'

Steve needed backers. Powerful allies. He went to the Earthenware Café and entreated with the owner, a powerful member of the valley's gay and lesbian community, to seek her support.

‘I'm sorry, Steve.' She set an espresso down in front of him and shook her head. ‘I don't know anything about Gorgon except their name. But in Greek mythology, Gorgon symbolises primal darkness. Mystery. Devouring sexuality. These values speak to my community's everyday values.'

‘I stand for all of those things too,' Steve pleaded. ‘And I also stand for balanced budgets and sensible solutions.' But the café owner did not reply. She was pro-Gorgon.

Three days until the election. Steve got up early. He reminded himself that in politics image was everything, so he brushed his teeth, shaved and dressed. His plan was to go around the local businesses again. Warn them that Gorgon was a radical who would cripple them with regulation, bureaucracy and red tape. There weren't many business owners in Te Aro, but they were pretty much the only people who actually voted in the elections. So long as Steve had them on his side he'd be fine.

But when he turned onto Aro Street the first thing he saw was a small crowd gathered around the video store admiring a black spiral spray-painted on the side of the building. Beneath the spiral, dripping black letters spelled: GORGON.

Steve saw the owner of the video store on the edge of the crowd. He hurried over to him.

‘It happened last night,' the owner explained, pointing at the graffiti. He was a thin man with a bowl of light brown hair hanging down over his face.

‘It's illegal advertising,' Steve said. ‘Why don't you clean it off?'

‘People seem to like it.' The owner gestured at the crowd. ‘Maybe it'll be good for business. Maybe this Gorgon knows what they're doing.'

‘Nobody even knows who Gorgon is,' Steve protested. ‘Does Gorgon even exist?'

‘I grew up here in the valley,' said an older woman standing beside them. She had grey hair and wore a fake fur coat over a sundress. ‘When we were kids, we sang a rhyme about Gorgon.
Hide me. Blind me. Or Gorgon will find me
.'

‘What does it mean?' Steve asked.

The woman creased her brow. ‘It was something to do with someone who disappeared a long time ago, down in the catacombs.'

‘Who disappeared? When?'

‘A girl, I think. I don't remember when. I'm pretty drunk.'

‘So what is Gorgon?'

The video store owner said, ‘When I was a kid, we thought Gorgon was a terrible monster that destroyed everything it encountered. Now, I don't know much about politics,' he admitted, ‘but maybe that's the kind of leader Te Aro needs right now.'

Steve went home and spent the rest of the morning designing leaflets on his laptop. Decency. Family. Values. These were things that mattered to voters, even in Te Aro. So he Photoshopped a smiling image of himself onto a picture of laughing children and typed beneath it in a large, friendly light-blue font:
Safer Sensible Friendly Communities
. He had forty pieces of paper left in his printer and no money to buy more, so he printed out forty copies of his image and spent the afternoon wandering the valley looking for houses where families probably lived and slipping his pamphlet into their letterboxes.

The next morning there were leaflets in every mailbox in Te Aro. Nobody had seen who'd delivered them. They were totally black on both sides. The paper itself felt oddly heavy and cold, and all who touched them experienced headaches and dizziness. Everyone knew they'd come from Gorgon.

Steve spent most of the day at home. The Te Aro Community Volunteer Newsletter had run a vicious smear story against him alleging his involvement in the controversial Holloway Road scandal. The allegations were sourced to ‘senior staffers' in the Gorgon campaign.

~

Election day.

It was the autumnal equinox. There was early-morning frost; ice in the puddles. A chill mist hung about the valley. People saw malign, ominous shapes in the fog, and everyone agreed that this was a good omen for Gorgon.

Steve spent the day getting the vote. He toured all of the cults that were friendly to him and reminded their leaders to command their disciples to vote Steve, and to do so multiple times. ‘Make them stagger their votes throughout the day so the scrutineers don't get suspicious.'

Then the sun set behind the western hills and the polls closed. Steve watched as the council secretary ordered the ballot box to be sealed and led the Grand Druid and the Chief Executive of the Te Aro Anarchist Organisation into his offices to count the votes. Anxiety ate at him. He'd done everything he could to win and committed voter fraud on a massive scale—but would it be enough to defeat Gorgon? He just didn't know.

By midnight the Community Hall was filled. A sea of people stretched from wall to wall. Steve and Kim sat on the stage waiting for the result. Gorgon's chair remained empty.

Then the council secretary forced his way through the crowd, which hushed when he stood on a chair and waved his arms for silence. He flourished a piece of paper in his hand. ‘The votes have been counted and checked,' he shouted. ‘And the results are decisive. This was not a narrow win. This was not a comfortable victory. This was a landslide. The new Councillor of Te Aro Community Council is'—he glanced at his piece of paper to double-check—‘Gorgon!'

Before the crowd could react, a sudden, savage gust of wind shook the building. The double doors at the back of the hall boomed open. The lights flickered and died, plunging the crowd into darkness.

A red light flared up in the square outside. A man screamed and the whole hall gasped. The stench of smoke and gasoline filled the room as sheets of flames criss-crossed the square, casting a hellish glare on the crowd. From his vantage point on the stage, Steve could see that the fire on the square had a pattern.

A spiral.

There was another long moment of shocked silence, then the archivist appeared beside the doorway. The flames danced in his yellow eyes; he gestured at the doorway and the darkness and fire beyond it. ‘Residents of Te Aro,' he cried out, ‘I give you—Gorgon!'

The flames surged. The crowd cheered.