Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (8 page)

‘Soup?' The bowl steamed, filling the air with the scents of chilli and mint. Danyl nodded and inhaled and sighed.

He was in the Sufi Soup Emporium, a place on Aro Street that sold Sufi Good Soup at Sufi Low Prices. The proprietor, a small round man with a long white beard and hypnotic brown eyes, set a bowl of steaming chickpea soup down on the table. He bowed and withdrew.

Danyl set the blue envelope beside it, unopened, and took Eleanor's phone from his jacket pocket. The display flashed at him: Message waiting.

Danyl was still shaken after his encounter with the giant. He'd taken a table facing the door of the soup kitchen—there were only three tables, crammed together between the bare concrete walls, the stainless steel serving counter and orange linoleum floor—so he could see the empty stretches of Aro Street through the windows. Every time he looked down at his soup he saw movement outside in his peripheral vision and thought it was the giant come to slay him, or Eleanor and her kitchen hands; but it was always just a bus passing by or a tree bending in the wind.

He sipped his soup and tried to relax. This café always played a type of mystical North African music: a fusion of cymbals, drums and chanting, and it had a calming effect on Danyl. After a few moments he felt safe.

He returned the blue envelope to his jacket pocket. He'd risked a lot to get it, but now he didn't need it: he had an actual message from Verity. Hopefully it would reveal her location. If she was lost he would find her. If she was in danger—and Danyl felt sure she was, even if Verity herself might not realise it—he would rescue her.

He picked up the phone, turned the volume back on and accessed the voicemail. There was a pause, then the sound of a bad line and Verity's voice, crackling and broken, saying, ‘It's me.'

Verity. Danyl closed his eyes. The subharmonics of her voice—ethereal, mysterious; warm yet cruel—ran through him like a current. He'd found her. Oh, not literally. But he'd made contact. She was more than just a confusion of memories, a riddle from the past. She was real. He had her scent, or, at least a digital recording of it. He was close. Very close.

The message continued; she said, ‘I'm leaving. You might never see me again. Goodbye.'

Danyl frowned. He swallowed a chickpea and reminded himself that Verity's message was meant for Eleanor. It was Eleanor who might never see Verity again. That might be a good thing, although the talk about leaving worried him a little.

‘Before I go I want to tell you a story,' she continued. He heard footsteps in the background: she was calling from a cellphone and walking while she talked. ‘I want to tell you about Simon.' Danyl licked his lips. Simon was the scientist who lived on the farm near Verity's childhood home. He'd played a mysterious and sinister role in her life ever since.

‘You asked me how I found him but I never told you. I had this idea that it needed to stay secret.' She laughed mirthlessly. ‘I had this idea,' she repeated. ‘We both know, now, that our ideas are not our own. Our thoughts are not ours. Why did I keep that secret? Why am I telling you now?

‘After we fought and you left to go into your monastery, I wandered. I drank too much. I lost myself. I spent a lot of time walking the streets of the cities I travelled through. I always took my camera with me, and I woke after week-long blackouts and looked back at all the pictures I took. I saw bars and houses I didn't remember, saw myself laughing with my arms around people I didn't know. But mostly I saw streets, buildings, squares. I saw cityscapes taken from impossible vantage points, or districts that couldn't be identified by anyone I showed them to. I wondered to myself, What are cities? Are they a human invention? Or are they a species of autonomous creature: unthinking, immortal which humans are doomed to perpetuate and service. Do we live in cities or do cities live off us, like parasites? Is that what's wrong with our species? We evolved as nomadic agrarians but we've been captured by this malign idea of urbanism, and now we're doomed to live and die in thrall to the perpetuation of cities, which will eventually merge to become one vast planetary city. And what then?

‘But you know all this. One morning, one city, everything changed. I woke up on a gurney in a hospital ward with a backless hospital gown on and no memory of how I got there. A nurse gave me some clothes from the lost property bin and I wandered around the ward, and eventually found my way into a prayer meeting.

‘It was a featureless, mostly empty room. A few quiet cancer patients. I don't remember what the priest looked like or even if he was a priest or an enthusiastic amateur. All I remember is that he was talking about the Tower of Babel, the old story from Genesis. You know how it goes, or at least you think you do. After the great flood of Noah, the people of the Earth spoke one language and so they attempted to build a tower reaching to the heavens. God saw this and took anger at their pride, and so he destroyed their tower and confused their languages. But at this point in the story, a voice from the back of the room called, “That's not what happened.”

‘I turned. A tall man with receding curly hair and a red beard stood at the back of the room. He wore a hospital orderly outfit with a raincoat over the top and a bag slung over his shoulder. I recognised him but I didn't remember from where. Someone I'd photographed? Someone I'd slept with? No, the memory was older than that. I knew him when I was young … and then I realised. This was the man who lived at the farm near my childhood home. The man who changed my life. I stared but he didn't even see me. He was talking to the priest.

‘He said, “The story you told is the way it's always told. People built a tower and God got angry. But pick up a copy of your Bible, any Bible.” He gestured at the pile of King James Bibles stacked on the table by the door. “Read what's really written. The people built a city—the first city in human history—and a tower, but it was the city that angered God and the city he forced them to abandon by creating a confusion of languages. But why? We don't know. The Bible doesn't say. The real story isn't a parable about pride. It's a mystery.”

‘I can't remember what else he said, or if the priest replied. But his words shocked me. For months I'd been obsessed with cities, and suddenly this stranger from my past had reappeared in my life, and he'd talked about cities. How could this be? Then I realised he was gone. I ran to the door and saw him turn a corner at the far end of the hall. I followed him through the hospital to his workplace: a microbiology lab. I lurked around outside it for his entire shift, twelve hours, until he walked out through the security doors, unshaven and bleary, and I followed him home to his apartment in a tenement building near the hospital.

‘It was Simon, of course. The poor man.' Verity laughed again. Danyl could hear rushing water in the background of her call, then the sound of her footsteps clattering over wood. ‘Humans have always had an intuition about reality,' she continued. ‘Everyone suspects it isn't what it seems, that you can pull back the curtain somehow and find the truth. Simon actually did it. For one brief moment, he stepped outside of existence and then he fell back into it again and spent the rest of his life trying to get out.

‘By the time I appeared at his door, he'd given up. He was living in squalor, hiding under a false name, working at a dead-end job. He had no idea who I was. He didn't remember our first brief meeting. He barely remembered the farm and his laboratory hidden in a barn in its remote, overgrown reaches. That was just another failure in a lifetime filled with them. He barely listened as I introduced myself. He was shutting the door in my face until I told him that I'd crept onto the farm the morning after the police raid, before the bulldozers arrived, and looked inside the barn, and seen the mural he drew of a spiral, vast and incomprehensible, like the fabric of the world had torn itself apart. That picture destroyed my life, I told him. Fifteen years later it still throbbed and coiled inside my mind, taunting me, telling me that everything I saw was an illusion, that I could tear a hole in the world, if I could only figure out how.

‘So I stood outside the door to his apartment and told him who I was. He listened, scratching his beard and thinking. Eventually he invited me into his room. I thought it might contain scientific apparatus, or holy books, or perhaps another mural of the spiral, but it was sparsely furnished. The only texts were a few news magazines. He locked the door and I felt my life closing in around me. I sat on his uncomfortable, food-stained couch, wondering if I would ever leave the room alive, and he perched at the end of his bed.

‘He would help me, he announced. He would try to find a way back, make one last attempt. There was much he needed to tell me, many things to explain. Things were both simpler and more difficult than I could imagine. But first he needed one thing. One simple thing that I needed to fetch for him. A small vial of water from a certain pool. It was a kind of test, he explained, but also a vital step in the process. Then he smiled. “I'm getting ahead of myself,” he said. “Let me begin at the beginning. I grew up in a place not far from here. A strange old place called the Aro Valley …”'

Verity broke off. The phone was warm against Danyl's ear. He listened to her breath; her footsteps as they crunched along a gravel path, the crackling of the line.

Finally, she said, ‘We both know the rest. Or at least we think we do. We found what we were looking for. A path. A way beyond existence. The Real City. But of course when we found it, we saw that it wasn't what we really wanted, and that the pathway we'd spent our lives looking for merely led to another pathway. And where does the new one lead?

‘That's what we've been trying to find out. That's what all this … madness has been about. But I think we've been doing it wrong. I think we've been tricked, Ellie. Lied to. I know you don't agree with me. And maybe you're right. I hope you are. But I have to find out.' There was another pause. More footsteps on gravel, then a series of dull clangs. Steps. Verity was climbing a flight of metal stairs. Danyl counted ten steps. Next he heard a key in a lock, the creak of a door, and Verity said, ‘I'm here now. It's too late to stop me, even if you wanted to. I might never see you again. If I don't … I'm sorry. Goodbye.'

Danyl listened to the message three times.

The first time he was distracted by Verity's voice and the feelings it evoked. Loss. Sorrow. Rage. Did he still love her? Had she ever loved him? If she did, why had she left him?

The second time he listened to the actual words of the message. It answered some questions but asked many more. Who was Simon, really? Danyl thought he was just a biochemist, but Verity saw him as a kind of visionary. And where was this mysterious pool?

The third time Danyl tuned out the words and listened to the sounds beneath them. Verity was moving around the Aro Valley, talking as she walked. If he could pinpoint the background noises he could track her.

The message was nine minutes long. He took a scrap of paper from his satchel and wrote down markers at thirty-second intervals, then wrote the sounds as he identified them. At the start of the message was a garbled noise he could not identify. Then her footsteps splashing in puddles. The wind. About two minutes in, he heard metal scraping on concrete, and the wind died away. Perhaps she was walking along a sheltered path or an alleyway? Or inside a building somewhere?

Four minutes: the sound of running water. A gutter or even a stream.

Four minutes, thirty seconds: footsteps on wood, then the sound of water faded away. The wind again and Verity's footsteps crunching on gravel. Behind that an odd squawking noise he couldn't quite identify. He frowned, tried to tune out her voice … Chickens! Yes, definitely the sound of chickens. They weren't uncommon in the valley—few people in Te Aro trusted the organic egg industrial complex—but still, a useful clue. For the last few minutes there was only wind and footsteps on gravel, ending with either a climb or descent of a long flight of steps, and then a door opening.

All good stuff, but the valley was a big place. Danyl really needed to identify the beginning of Verity's journey. Then he could track the subsequent sounds. He played the message a fourth time, pressing the phone to his ear, concentrating so intently his brain gave him a warning buzz. He ignored it and threw everything he had into deciphering the odd, faint noises in the background at the very start of the message.

Then Danyl laughed and slapped the table. He had her! The sound at the start of her call was music: cymbals; chanting. It was the mystical music playing in the soup kitchen. Verity had ended her call exactly nine minutes away from the same place he sat now.

‘She's a little shorter than me. Thin. With dark hair, I don't know how she cuts it now, I haven't seen her for six months. Her name is Verity. She was talking on a phone when she walked out. You must know who I'm talking about.'

But the old man behind the soup counter shook his head again. ‘I cannot help you, sir.'

‘Sure you can.' Danyl reached into his pocket and peeled a note from the roll of cash he'd stolen from Eleanor's restaurant. He dropped it in the tip jar and leaned across the counter. ‘Just tell me which way she went. Nod your head in that direction.'

‘I cannot disclose anything. Sufi Soup places great importance on the privacy of its customers.'

‘Ha!' Danyl pounced. ‘So she was your customer! She was here. You admit it!'

‘All of humanity is my customer.'

‘Oh.' Danyl drummed his fingers on the counter, frustrated, trying to think of a way to outwit the wise and ancient soup cook. Nothing came to him, so he began to plead. ‘Please, old man. I need your help. I need to find my girlfriend. Technically my ex-girlfriend. We might get back together. Anyway, she was here, earlier, and I need to find her. I think she's about to make a terrible mistake.'

‘What kind of mistake?'

‘I'm not sure, exactly. She said something about going beyond existence. Have you seen her?'

The old man was about to help. Danyl could see it in his eyes; they brimmed with compassion. But then they glanced sideways at the tip jar. The note Danyl had dropped inside it lay curled against the glass. Something about it seemed to displease the soup cook. His eyes turned cold, and he said curtly, ‘I'm sorry. All I can offer you is soup.'

‘Soup? Soup? What about your faith?' Danyl demanded, waving his hand at the painting of Rumi. ‘Doesn't it command you to help the needy in their moment of need?'

‘My faith is about obedience to God,' the old man replied. ‘The prophets and sages are silent on whether I should help you find your girlfriend. But my common sense tells me to stay silent. You say you want to help her, but what if you intend her harm?'

‘And so you don't get involved, just because you don't know what's going on? What kind of common sense is that? What if your silence leads to tragedy?'

‘Silence is an ocean,' the old man answered. The bright yellow light mounted above the counter bathed him in an otherworldly glow. ‘When the ocean seeks, do not flee into the river of words.'

It was raining again. Danyl stood outside the soup kitchen trying to parse the old man's cryptic aphorism. What did it mean? Nothing, he suspected. But perhaps it was wisdom, and Danyl simply wasn't wise enough to understand it. That was the problem with wisdom. It was only apparent to those who already had it. If you were ignorant and you really needed wisdom, it was useless to you.

He put the old man out of his mind, and looked up and down Aro Street. Verity's message was nine minutes long. She could have walked along the street in either direction. She could have turned off onto Epuni Street, or Devon Street, or walked through the park, or down any number of pathways. Still, there were the chickens. Chickens near a gravel path. And somewhere near the beginning of the message Verity had passed through a gate or doorway and then over running water. That was plenty to go on.

When he last saw Verity six months ago, she'd fled in a pick-up truck driven—Danyl suspected—by Simon the mysterious chemist. They had gone west into the depths of the valley, so Danyl walked this way now. He kept his phone out and kept an eye on the time, and paced off nine minutes, then added on an extra sixty seconds to account for Verity's purpose-driven stride. This brought him out of the commercial area of the valley into a residential section of moderate prosperity. Many of the houses had cars parked outside them, and many of those cars had wheels. Danyl crossed from one side of the road to the other trying to identify gates or streams or gravel paths, and listening for chickens over the static of the rain.

There were a few gates. There were no streams and no chickens. There was gravel, but not enough. Verity walked up her path for at least three minutes, which was a long time to walk on gravel. Most garden paths took five to ten seconds. Her path was unusually long: he would know it when he saw it. It was nowhere in this part of the valley.

He returned to the soup kitchen and headed in the opposite direction. He detoured through the park. He investigated stairways. His shoes filled with water. He found chickens, eventually: a miserable clutch of fowl croaking beneath a leafless tree. They were confined in the back garden of a house bedecked with crystal wind chimes and daubed with astrological symbols, which the chickens themselves seemed to regard with contempt. Danyl searched this section of the valley for several minutes, peeking over fences and down driveways. There were no gravel paths. No steel gates. The chickens clucked to one another as he prowled about.

He continued his search. The streets were still empty, untravelled except for an empty bus that rumbled by. Where was everyone? The valley had a post-rapture feeling to it. Danyl surveyed the dark houses, the apartment buildings with their rows of darkened windows. He checked driveways. Down one of them he stumbled across three elderly men having sex on a muddy lawn. So not everyone was missing. Another drive led to a freshly painted, renovated house with an elegant sign beside the door advertising the Church of Real Economics, with a picture of a mushroom cloud beneath it. The sound of chanting came from inside. Interesting, but no sign of Verity and none of the sounds of her passage. He must have missed something.

He returned to Aro Street and stood under an awning, scanning the buildings. His eyes fell on the entrance to the alleyway where Joy had vanished.

Danyl hadn't looked inside the blue envelope yet. He'd been focused on Verity's message, but he was also a little scared. Everyone who opened a blue envelope vanished. Even Ann. But what if Verity had gone into the alleyway? Would Danyl have to look inside the envelope to follow her?

He crossed the road. The alley looked the same. Dirty and empty. No sign of Verity. No chickens. He checked the two branches where it forked behind the apartment buildings at the back. Nothing.

He was about to leave when he glanced down the narrow concrete steps that ran down the side of one of the buildings. At the bottom was a small landing and a door in the wall. The early morning rain had swept a flurry of leaves and rubbish to the bottom of the steps, where someone had opened the door, clearing a precise semicircle in the debris.

Verity? Possibly. Danyl descended the steps. He tried the handle. Of course, it was locked.

He consulted his timetable of Verity's message. A door opened about two minutes after the sound of the mystical music faded. He timed himself as he returned to the soup kitchen.

It took him exactly two minutes.

Danyl returned to the alleyway. He stood at the top of the steps and looked around, inspecting the area more carefully than last time. He noticed a sign attached to the wall of the alleyway, faded and weather-beaten into near invisibility. It read:

Ye Undergrounde Bookshoppe

Purveyors of Used Books and Finest Quality Darkness

An arrow on the sign pointed down the steps. Beneath the arrow, all but imperceptible, was an outline of the spiral.

Danyl took a deep breath and opened the blue envelope.