Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (31 page)

He woke in the Real City.

It was a relief to be there. Calm. Dry. Safe. No one was screaming or being electrocuted. No orgies or dogs. No one smashing his head in. No pain. No Medicated Danyl or Unmedicated Danyl. Just the plaza, the bridges, the endless void above and beyond.

The Spiral.

It hung in the distance. A labyrinthine network of curves and shadows. A corruption at the heart of things. A new path led from the entry plaza directly to it.

So that was the secret of the Real City. Observing it did change it. The number of observers reduced the number of pathways. It didn't matter how far you travelled, the Spiral could be reached from the entry plaza only if you were the only person in the City.

Why? What did the pathways have to do with the fine structure constant? Who had built the Real City? Why had they designed it that way? Was it even designed? Or were its properties—like Danyl's own unlikely existence—just a cosmic accident?

If there was an answer to these questions, it lay beyond the Spiral. Ever since Danyl had returned to the Aro Valley he'd been beset by mysteries and riddles, and the only answer to any of them was another question. Now the ultimate solution lay within reach.

If Eleanor was right, then the Spiral offered illumination. Anyone who touched the Spiral would learn the answers to all the mysteries and attain peace beyond all understanding. Bliss.

But if Gorgon was right, it offered horror. Madness. Annihilation. The mystery was just a lure. A phosphorescent light dangling before the open maw of a great fish in a drowned cave. Who was Gorgon, though? A crazy old lady who'd torn out her own eyes, that's who.

He stepped onto the bridge and walked towards the Spiral. He expected to feel something. Radiation. Power. Menace.

But he felt nothing. Up close, the Spiral looked no different from how it looked at a distance. It resembled some terrible energy frozen at the instant of release. The plaza that surrounded it was a featureless space with no other exits. When Danyl finished circling it, he found that his own path leading back to the main plaza was gone. He had come to a place without even the illusion of choice.

He reached out and touched the Spiral.

Verity woke in the back seat of a bus.

She must have drifted off for a second. The bus was crawling along Aro Street in heavy traffic. It was late at night. Heavy rain outside. The heater in the bus was broken and she was very cold, but she didn't mind. It felt good to feel things again. Even cold.

The streets outside were crowded. The bars and cafés were open. There were many house parties. People huddled in open doorways and garages or simply danced in the street in the rain. Verity's exhausted, half-awake, half-dreaming mind was beset with memories, prompted by the places the bus passed. There was her old art gallery. There was Eleanor's café, where she'd tested out the DoorWay compound after Simon had successfully resynthesised it, drugging her unsuspecting customers. Next they passed Devon Street, where Danyl and Verity had lived together; where Verity was happy, briefly, before Danyl had his breakdown and both their lives fell apart.

The bus stopped to take on more passengers at Aro Park. Verity pressed her forehead against the cool window and looked out at the stone table and chairs beneath the oak trees, now drowned in rain and shadow. She remembered sitting beneath those trees amidst shafts of blinding midday sun with Simon and Eleanor. Simon had held up a tiny capsule containing a glowing blue liquid. DoorWay.

‘We're prisoners,' he told them, in a speech they'd heard many times before. ‘We are the most hopeless, the most doomed type of prisoner: the captive who does not see his own cage. We feel alive. We feel as if we have choices. But we're like characters in a story. We feel alive only when we are observed. Our future is already written: we have no real choices, and if our story is not told, we cease to exist.' He flourished the capsule. ‘This is our way out of the unseen prison. It is how we will tell our own stories instead of being trapped inside them.'

But three months later, when Simon lay cradled in Verity's arms with the side of his head caved in, Gorgon appeared and told Verity that what lay beyond the Spiral was not revelation or freedom, but, rather, unthinkable malignant horror. The thing beyond the Spiral had poisoned Simon's mind when he was a child, she explained, and to prevent it from crossing back into our world they would have to drug as many people as possible and trap them in the Real City.

Eleanor still believed that the Spiral led to freedom. She pretended to go along with Gorgon because she thought that bringing more people across might open a way through the City. But Verity didn't know what to think. She was numbed by the shock of the brutal attack on Simon and by the horror of Gorgon's revelations. She meekly obeyed Gorgon and Eleanor.

For the next three weeks, they spent their nights luring and kidnapping and drugging a few dozen of the braver and dumber residents of Te Aro. They were assisted by the creepy but obedient staff who worked at the second-hand bookshop Gorgon owned: they called themselves the Cartographers. They carried the drugged prisoners through the network of tunnels to Threshold, and when they'd used up all of the DoorWay compound they brewed up another batch under Eleanor's supervision.

‘More,' Eleanor told them every night, as she sent them out to lure more victims into the bookshop. ‘We need more pilgrims. We're close.'

And then Simon died. They buried him in a shallow grave on a high, lonely promontory at the edge of Threshold. More like a pit of mud, Verity thought, as a Cartographer shovelled on the last clots and smoothed the earth with his spade.

‘Perhaps it's for the best,' Gorgon said as they struggled down the windswept slope, after the brief wordless ceremony was over. ‘Now it's all done. The way will be closed. We can let the pilgrims wake.'

Verity agreed. ‘We can.'

Eleanor gave them both a knowing look. She dropped back to whisper with one of the Cartographers, a repulsive goat-faced man who worked part-time at the bookshop and part-time at Te Aro Council as an archivist.

They did not wake the pilgrims that night. The next day, Eleanor sent the Cartographers into the valley to distribute more maps in blue envelopes, to lure more Te Aro residents into the bookshop. She stationed guards at the foot of the steps leading to Gorgon's house. ‘To keep her safe,' Eleanor explained, before hurrying off to supervise the manufacture of another batch of DoorWay.

Verity took the compound herself. It was her first journey to the Real City since the attack on Simon, and she could see it had changed. The number of paths was different. Some were dead ends. Vast regions of the City, where she'd once wandered in those carefree days with Eleanor and Simon, were now inaccessible.

‘We're making incredible progress,' said Sophus, the mathematician whom Eleanor had recruited from somewhere to help them reach the Spiral. ‘We just need more data.'

‘More pilgrims,' Eleanor told her Cartographers. ‘More DoorWay.'

Where would it end, Verity wondered? How many more captives? How many lives stolen? Who were Simon and Gorgon, really? What had happened to them? Where did DoorWay come from? How many more drugged bodies would Verity have to carry through the catacombs beneath the valley? How many more adult nappies swollen with urine would she have to change? There had to be a better way.

Anyone challenging Eleanor was quickly drugged with DoorWay and dumped on a mattress in a Threshold townhouse. Verity knew not to make that mistake. Instead, she created a distraction. She wrote a note to Eleanor, pretending to be the mysterious Adversary that Gorgon had warned them about, and offered to meet her at Te Aro Archive, knowing that Eleanor would bring all of the Cartographers with her. Next, Verity sent several other interested parties—a giant, a band of idiots—to the same location. While they were all distracted, Verity left an apologetic voicemail for Eleanor, then she stole into Gorgon's house. She slipped past the old woman dozing in a rocking chair. She went down the steps to her basement.

She found the fissure in the wall and followed the tunnel as it spiralled down to the Chamber of the Great Sponge. She came to the pool with its thin film of bright blue liquid, the same colour as DoorWay. She dipped her fingers into the substance, and she woke in the Real City.

Whatever the substance in the pool was, it was different from DoorWay. The Real City seemed more real, somehow. Verity couldn't switch focus and glimpse the real world while she was trapped in the City. Reality was gone.

So she wandered the paths and plazas, waiting for the substance to wear off, waiting for the moment when she would wake, stiff and disorientated, back in the darkness of the Cavern of the Great Sponge. But the moment never came. She walked on and on, until she lost all hope of waking up. The substance in the pool had doomed her to roam the Real City forever. Eventually her corporeal body would die, and perhaps then she would be free of the City. Or perhaps not?

But then the City began to change. Rapidly. New paths proliferated, opening new routes, new vistas. Eventually she arrived back at the entry plaza, which now had 147 paths, the last of which vanished into the horizon, leading directly to the Spiral.

‘That was us,' Steve explained to Verity during a secret late-night debriefing at the Te Aro Council offices. ‘The number of paths in the Real City were reduced as a function of the number of people observing it. The more pilgrims seeking the Spiral, the more paths, and the more futile the search. When we drugged the last batch of DoorWay and sent everyone into an'—Steve hesitated, searching for words—‘excited state.' He nodded to himself. ‘All the pilgrims woke from the City, and you were the last one left inside it. The final pathway appeared.'

Steve sat on the handsome leather chair behind the Councillor's desk. He wore leather cowboy boots and a handsome cowboy hat that he'd discovered while rummaging through the closet of his new office, and a tartan bathrobe he'd found in Gorgon's house once he'd stumbled, exhausted and bloody but triumphant, back to the surface of the world.

Once dressed, he'd stood at the front door of Gorgon's house and looked out over Threshold as the dawn cleaned away the shadows and mist. The wasteland was dotted with wretched figures stumbling about, alone and in groups, naked, emaciated, with broken fingernails and bruised genitals; the people of Te Aro stood blinking and bewildered in the pale winter sunlight.

Steve took charge. He cared for them. He found them clothes. He ordered the Sufi Soup Emporium to construct a makeshift Sufi Soup kitchen so he could feed and hydrate them. He looted the lab and distributed antiseptic cream and bandages for their scratches and aloe lotion for their genitals. He found crutches to help them stand and walk. He deputised the Cartographers and ordered them to help. When everyone could walk, Steve used Lightbringer to smash open the large wooden gate at the base of the hill and he led the wounded procession slowly through it, down Raroa Road and onto Aro Street. The procession stopped at Aro Park and Steve stood on the stone table there and addressed the crowd through a megaphone, the rising sun at his back and the wind whipping open his dressing gown to reveal he was naked beneath it.

Steve told the people of Te Aro that he was their new Councillor. He promised to be a wise and just leader. They had been victims of a mass kidnapping, he explained, and he had instructed his deputies to track down those responsible and bring them to justice. The crowd cheered. The deputised Cartographers applauded.

As for their hallucinations and last night's mass orgy, these were caused by a toxic mould growing in the tunnels beneath the valley, Steve explained. His first act as Councillor would be protect Te Aro from the mould by sealing the tunnels with tonnes of concrete, forever.

That's when things turned ugly. The Cartographers applauded, but the crowd did not.

The residents protested, demanding that this mould be cultivated and made commercially available to them. Steve refused. The crowd jeered and jostled closer. Someone demanded new elections. A new Councillor. Steve signalled to his secretary and his Deputy Councillor, Kim, who were waiting in the shadows at the edges of the park, and they turned on the firehoses and drenched the residents, driving them back, while Steve informed them over the screams that'd he'd cancelled future elections in perpetuity. And so, government and order was restored to the Aro Valley.

Verity sat in Steve's office, telling her story while Steve sat back in his chair with his cowboy boots on the Councillor's desk. The secretary sat off to the side; a shadowy presence taking notes of everything Verity said.

‘I remember approaching the Spiral.' She pressed her fingertips to her eyes, concentrating. ‘I couldn't believe I'd made it. I thought something would snatch it away at the last minute. But then I reached out and touched it. I felt the Real City melt away. A blinding light inside my mind spilled open, flooding me. And then I woke up.'

Steve asked, ‘When you went beyond the Spiral, did you see anything … noteworthy? Another universe, say?'

‘No.'

‘Any malevolent sentient beings? Mathematical or otherwise?'

‘No.'

‘Did you encounter any evil entity that seized control of your brain, of any kind?'

‘Not to my knowledge.'

Steve tried to lean back further, but his ergonomic chair wouldn't allow it. Instead he steepled his fingers and said, ‘And your friend. Your co-conspirator. Eleanor. Where is she?'

‘I don't know. Have you tried her café?'

‘Of course. My deputies have searched the entire valley for her. She's vanished.'

‘Maybe she's left the valley?'

‘That would be best for everyone,' Steve said. ‘And the same goes for you, Verity. Oh, we could put you on trial. Imprison you in a café in the park. Set up a Truth and Reconciliation Committee and expose the horror of what you did to this valley, then pelt you with rotten beetroot.'

‘You have no legal—'

Steve raised his voice, sharply. ‘But we're not going to do that. We need to bury what happened here. For the good of the valley. I'm going to seal those tunnels. Destroy that laboratory. Impound that bookshop and turn it into a microbrewery. The mysteries of DoorWay and the Real City will be forgotten. The way will be sealed. Forever.' He turned to the secretary. ‘Did you get her story?'

‘Yes.'

‘Yes, what?'

‘Yes, Sheriff.'

‘Stamp it “Sheriff's eyes only” and file it in my private archive. Then forget everything you heard here tonight.'

‘Yes, Sheriff.'

Steve turned back to Verity. ‘There's a bus leaving Te Aro in one hour,' he said. ‘My deputies will escort you to your home and help you pack. They'll make sure you're on it. And Verity? Once you've left this valley—don't come back.'

Verity stared out the bus window and thought about Steve's plan. Was the way sealed? She didn't think so. Simon Ogilvy believed that whatever lay beyond the Spiral was like water, and that our universe was a desert. Simon thought that anything vital or alive in our universe came from ideas that leaked through from another. All our ideas, our choices, all our free will derived from it. The Real City was one conduit into our universe, but there were others. Ideas broke through. People dreamed. They created. The world changed.

The bus turned. Verity shifted sideways. Danyl grunted as she bumped into him. She leaned her head on his shoulder.

Danyl. When she'd woken in the Chamber of the Great Sponge he was lying beside her, bleeding from a cut in his head. He woke a few minutes later, disoriented. Confused. Trying to speak. Making no sense. He couldn't walk, so Steve and Verity helped him up the tunnel to Gorgon's basement. When they reached it, Verity washed Danyl's wound and bandaged it. Steve inspected his eyes. ‘His right pupil is larger than the left,' he said. ‘That's a good sign.'

Verity stripped Danyl, dried him, and put him to bed. She laid cold compresses against his wound, and when his bleeding stopped and his breathing calmed and his eyes returned to normal, she climbed into bed next to him, and they lay sleeping together for twelve hours, until the leering archivist shook them awake and demanded Verity's presence in the Councillor's Chamber.