Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (26 page)

The fence around perimeter of the Threshold development was made of tall wooden slats topped with barbed wire that jutted out at an impossible-to-climb diagonal angle. It was designed to keep people out.

Ordinary people. Not Steve.

He slipped through the barbed wire, sustaining only minor injuries to his face. Then he was inside Threshold, moving through the darkness, more shadow than man.

He'd entered Threshold at the point closest to the laboratory where the Cartographers manufactured their DoorWay. And there it was, dead ahead through the trees: a dark bulk against a dark sky.

He drew closer. He circled the two-storey building until he came to an area with lights in the windows. The hum of voices. The Cartographers were on the ground floor in the rooms adjacent to the road. There was a sentry, a lone male Cartographer who stood outside the main entrance with his hands in the pockets of his black wool jacket, stamping his feet, his breath steaming. Steve watched. After a few minutes the sentry did a circuit of the building and returned to his post.

Rudimentary. Really this was almost beneath him. If the fate of the universe wasn't at stake, Steve probably wouldn't bother at all. But it was, so he faded back into the trees and took up position overlooking the lightless, unoccupied back of the laboratory. He waited for the sentry to pass.

While he waited, his gaze drifted from the laboratory townhouse to the road zigzagging up the hillside, to the lit windows of the house at the top of the hill. Gorgon's house. The wreckage of the scaffolding had been cleared away. Now a ladder led from the base of the house to the front door high above. It would take several minutes to get Steve's entire team up that ladder. And they'd be exposed: vulnerable to attack the entire time. He reached into his pocket and made sure that the giant's drugs were still there. If everything went to plan, they could all climb up to Gorgon's house without a care in the world. There would be no Cartographers to attack them.

He shifted his gaze to the lower storey of Gorgon's house. The basement. It was where Danyl had claimed Verity was being held. Even if she wasn't, the basement was still their ultimate destination. The key to the mystery of Gorgon and the Real City lay within it.

Steve had learned much from the secret archive. He'd learned about Matthias Ogilvy. The man was a wealthy property owner who'd built huge tracts of land in the Aro Valley and used his political connections to push through a plan of urban renewal. Larger roads. Huge tenement buildings. Massive changes to infrastructure. He began the Threshold development in anticipation of Te Aro's transformation from a bedraggled village into a modern urban utopia. There were protests. Battles pitched on the construction sites. But Threshold went ahead, and the skeletons of the townhouses rose above the Aro Valley mist.

Then, in August of 1974, everything changed.

Most of the front page of the 13 August 1974 issue of the Te Aro Community Volunteer Newsletter was taken up by an editorial pledging the Aro Valley's military support for the Communist government of North Vietnam, but a smaller story at the bottom of the page was headlined ‘Monster's Children Vanish Mysteriously'.

Police and search experts are combing the hills and gullies around Te Aro after the two children of loathsome property developer Matthias Ogilvy were reported missing from his Aro Street lair. Ogilvy has accused opponents of his horrible urban so-called renewal plans of kidnapping the children. However the Detective leading the investigation revealed that Ogilvy and his children had fought shortly before their disappearance
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The children had been locked inside the basement beneath Ogilvy's property as punishment, and the detective believes they have escaped and are hiding somewhere nearby
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The detective did admit bafflement as to how the children escaped the basement, which could be exited only via a narrow internal stairway accessed by a solid wooden door which Ogilvy assured him was never unlocked
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The police urge Te Aro residents to contact them immediately if they see Simon Ogilvy (age five) or Georgina Ogilvy (age ten)
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But, as Steve learned, what had begun as a simple story of two children disappearing from an evil property developer's locked basement turned murky when, three days later, the children were found. They were rescued from the catacombs by a police search team, who found them terrified and hypothermic. Simon Ogilvy was unharmed, but his older sister Georgina had suffered terrible injuries to her head. Something had gouged out the child's eyes.

Were Matthias Ogilvy's sins as a property developing capitalist the reason for his little girl's horrible mutilation? The subsequent edition of the Te Aro Community Volunteer Newsletter felt that they were. ‘Not that we're calling for little girls to be mutilated,' the editor insisted. ‘But if they are, then sadly urban development is often to blame.'

What had happened to the children? How did they get from the locked basement of Ogilvy's house at Threshold to the stormwater tunnel several kilometres away? What attacked them? The newspaper did not answer these questions, nor did the minutes from the confidential council meetings with Matthias Ogilvy that took place a week after his children were recovered:

7.45 pm: MR OGILVY requested that Te Aro Council abandon its infrastructure development plans, keep the roads at their current width and capacity and preserve the sewers and stormwater systems beneath the valley in their current state in perpetuity
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7.50 pm: TREASURER FOWLER reminded the council and MR OGILVY that the council has spent substantial sums on the planning and consent process for Te Aro's planned infrastructure upgrades, that these have been done at MR OGILVY'S insistence, and that to abandon the work will mean writing off all of these costs
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7.55 pm: COUNCILLOR MCNAUGHTON declined MR OGVILY'S request and announced that the infrastructure projects will proceed
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8.00 pm: MR OGILVY requested that he be allowed to address the council in confidence. The council approved this request
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8.05 pm: RECORD HALTED
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9.15 pm: RECORD RESUMED. The Council has agreed to halt all infrastructure projects and approved the construction of walls within the stormwater maintenance system for the purpose of blocking access to the tunnels of the old quarry and other natural cave networks beneath Te Aro
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There was more. Steve found the articles of incorporation for ‘The Threshold Reservation'. These were drawn up by Matthias Ogilvy's lawyers and signed by him on 28 August 1974. They established the site of the former property development as a nature reserve. ‘The site must remain untouched,' the articles insisted. ‘The buildings within its boundaries must be neither completed nor destroyed, and must remain uninhabited. No excavation of any kind must ever take place within Threshold. Its secrets must remain buried.'

The reservation was administered by the Threshold Trust. Matthias Ogilvy was its director. On the event of his death, the trust would be run by his daughter, Georgina. If she was not of age, or died, or violated the aforementioned laws of the reservation as determined by the secretary of Te Aro Council, then administration of the site would pass to Te Aro Council.

Steve was interested in that last point. Very interested. Ogilvy's poor, mutilated daughter Georgina had obviously grown up to become Gorgon, and she now ruled the Threshold development, or reservation, or whatever it was. But legally she had voided her right to do so. Hadn't she built tunnels connecting Threshold to the rest of the valley? Filled the uninhabited buildings with Cartographers and captors of the Real City? Didn't that mean that ownership of Threshold should pass to the head of Te Aro Council? And wasn't that Steve?

The answer to all of these questions was yes. Ergo, Threshold should belong to Steve. From here he could rule the entire valley, while covertly excavating deep below the reservation and uncovering its buried secrets, because what was the point of ruling from a reservation with buried secrets if you didn't excavate them?

So Steve's mission had changed. He wasn't here to save the universe. If Danyl and Ann and the giant wanted to save it, then that was fine. Steve wouldn't stop them. He had no quarrel with the universe. No, his mission was Gorgon. He needed to take her down, rescue the Council secretary from the Real City and have him strip Gorgon of her titles and lands. Then Steve would rule in her stead. And if the universe got saved along the way, so much the better.

Movement. Footsteps. Steve froze, held his breath and watched as the Cartographer made his way around the back of the townhouse. As soon as he was out of sight, Steve broke from the darkness, heading for the lab.

Danyl fled into Ann's bathroom. He shut and locked the door behind him. Ann rattled the handle and screamed, ‘Stop him! He's betraying the universe!' The house shook as the giant approached.

Danyl thought quickly. Was he betraying the universe? If Gorgon was trying to destroy it and Ann was trying to stop her, then yes, sure, he was betraying the universe. But, according to Steve, Eleanor argued that Gorgon and the Cartographers were saving the universe, and that her mysterious Adversary was trying to destroy it. And Ann was obviously that Adversary, right? She'd killed Simon Ogilvy, and stolen Danyl's book, and kept all of that a secret and manipulated Danyl all along. So if Ann was trying to destroy the universe and Gorgon was saving it, then Danyl's brilliant plan to cripple Gorgon's plot and defeat the Cartographers might not be such a great plan after all. It might actually end up destroying the universe.

So he had to stop Steve. Or alert Eleanor and the Cartographers, and they could stop him. But first Danyl needed to escape. He looked around Ann's bathroom and laundry, which had no other exits, no windows and only a small skylight with an extractor fan built into it in the roof high overhead.

This would be Danyl's third dramatic escape from a bathroom within twenty-four hours. Only this time it wouldn't be a simple case of leaping through the window or flooding the room until the floor collapsed. No, he needed something ingenious and fast.

He opened the cupboard beneath the wash-basin. It contained spare rolls of toilet paper, a toilet plunger, a bottle of bleach and an aerosol can of room freshener. That could be the answer. Danyl knew that if you mixed some common household items together you could make explosives, deadly gases, napalm. He didn't know what those items were, or how to mix them, but maybe he could stir the toilet paper, bleach and aerosol spray in the sink together, get lucky and blow a hole through the wall?

‘Danyl.' Ann pounded on the door. ‘Open up, now, or the giant will take the door off.'

Danyl ignored her. Improvising a deadly explosive inside the bathroom was a last resort. What else was there? He stood up and opened the washing machine, which was fixed to the wall by two steel braces. He was greeted with the smell of wet, dank laundry. He closed the washing machine and opened the dryer, which rested on the floor underneath it. It contained four large, dry, fluffy towels.

Interesting. Danyl looked up at the skylight. A wooden crossbeam ran beneath it, holding the extractor fan in place. There was a narrow gap between the crossbeam and the fan and, Danyl noticed, the skylight also had hinges at one end. It could be opened.

He looked from the skylight to the towels to the bottle of bleach to the sink and back again. Tie the wet clothes and towels together and escape through the roof? Or mix the chemicals and see if they blew up? Both plans had their strengths and weaknesses but Danyl went for the skylight. He dumped the sheets and clothes in a pile on the floor, squatted down and started to thread them together.

‘Little man. Don't make this harder than it needs to be.'

Danyl knew from experience that you can't just tie towels together then climb up them and expect them to hold. Fortunately, he also had the wet clothes to work with. Working quickly, he used sodden socks and bras to knot the towels into a long chain. He tied one end of the chain to the toilet plunger. He anchored the other end to one of the braces that fixed the washing machine to the wall.

‘Little man?' The door trembled as the giant drummed his fingers against it. ‘Open the door.'

‘Smash it in,' Ann commanded. ‘Quickly. He's up to something.'

Danyl took careful aim and threw the toilet plunger up at the skylight. It toppled over the crossbeam and fell back down, tumbling over and over in slow motion. Danyl caught it and pulled himself into the air, swinging across the room until his feet found purchase on the mirror above the wash-basin.

The door burst open and the giant's vast form darkened the doorway.

Danyl climbed faster: if he could reach the crossbeam he'd be out of the giant's grasp. But there was no way to make it in time. The giant looked almost bored as it approached. Danyl kicked off from the wall and swung to the other side of the room, landing on the washing machine, which shuddered under his weight.

The giant filled his field of vision; its massive arms telescoped towards him.

And then it all fell away. Danyl felt a terrible pain in his shoulder muscles as he was wrenched up through the air, out of the giant's deadly reach. The room filled with noise, then silence. Danyl looked down.

He was high above the floor now, adjacent to the crossbeam, in reach of the skylight. He looked down and saw the giant glaring up at him. On the floor at its feet lay the cracked and broken washing machine. The other end of the chain of towels was still attached to one of the wall braces, which had snapped off under Danyl's weight.

Ann stepped into the bathroom. She held her golf club in one hand. She saw Danyl dangling beneath the skylight, traced the path of his rope and ordered the giant, ‘Undo it.'

The giant knelt down and his massive fingers fumbled with the slender chain of towels and clothes. He was too slow. Far too slow. Danyl let go and grabbed on to the crossbeam beneath the skylight. He unlatched it and gave it a mighty shove. It swung open, admitting the cold wet night. He gasped in a lungful of rainwater and air.

Ann screamed with rage. Danyl winced as something that felt like a thrown golf club struck him in the back. But he didn't fall, and then he was through the skylight and lying belly-down on the roof of her house.

The night was black, the clouds were low and the rain was thick. Excellent conditions for running and hiding. He skidded down the slick tiles, jumped onto the roof of Ann's garage then over the fence into her neighbour's garden, which was a tangled, overgrown slope leading down, down towards Aro Street, where he could see the distant, mist-haloed lights of the apartment buildings above the bookshop.

With luck he could still stop Steve, and save the universe.