Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (13 page)

It was the last day of summer. The morning sun shone on the happy crowds bustling about Aro Community Hall. The children in the crèche were running and laughing. A group of them held hands and danced around a tree singing the Gorgon song, then fell to the ground shrieking with mock fear. Another cluster of toddlers squatted around the vegetables in the vegetable garden, urinating on them with abandon; their teachers had taught them this fed the crops.

The applicant stood outside the council offices. He smoothed the front of his shirt, which was buttoned up to his collar. He checked his reflection in the window. It showed a bald man with a neatly trimmed beard, a dimpled smile and too-bright eyes. He bared his teeth at the glass to make sure there wasn't any food stuck to them. He repeated an inspirational aphorism, reminding himself that he could achieve his dreams because he was made of stardust, then he slapped himself in the face and warned his reflection not to mess things up. This was too important.

He knocked on the door.

It was opened by a man dressed in tan pants and an open-necked business shirt who—at first glance—appeared impossibly handsome: slender with smooth tan skin, a strong jaw, dark jewelled eyes; but on closer examination he was oddly proportioned. His head was too large for his body; his arms too short. He looked like a figure in a digital photograph that had been improperly resized. He blinked at the applicant then held out his hand.

‘Welcome,' he said, ‘I am the Te Aro Council secretary. Very pleased to meet you, although I must add that this statement is not an endorsement of your application. I must remain strictly neutral towards each candidate.'

‘How many candidates are there?'

‘Just yourself,' the secretary replied. ‘But the principle remains.'

The applicant said, ‘I appreciate that.'

‘Your appreciation is appreciated.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Thank you for thanking me.'

The applicant hesitated, tempted to thank the secretary again, curious to see how many times he could compel the secretary to go on thanking him for thanking him. How deep would he go? But something in the man's smile spoke of a gentle willingness to stand on the doorstep engaged in a nest of infinitely recursed pleasantries. So the applicant said nothing, and the secretary stood aside and waved him in to the council offices.

‘We're in here,' he said, leading the applicant past the desks to a meeting room. A plastic table with a fake oak weave took up most of the space. A whiteboard on one wall was covered with plans and dates and diagrams, with ‘Te Aro Council Election' written at the top.

‘Only two months to go,' the secretary said, gesturing at the whiteboard. ‘You won't be involved in the election,' he added. ‘If you get this job. And I'm not saying you will or won't. But for the rest of us it is very exciting. It's been a troubled time at Te Aro Community Council.'

The applicant knew all about the troubles. They began with the Holloway Road incident six months ago. When police investigated a disturbance in an old house way up the remote end of the valley, they found an elderly Satanist who'd died of a heart attack, a fortune in lost gold and a naked, mentally ill writer named Danyl. There was a scandal and for several terrible weeks at the end of that summer the eyes of the world and the attentions of the authorities settled upon the hitherto untroubled community of Te Aro. Marijuana plantations were found and burned. Cult headquarters were raided and their fanatics deprogrammed. Anarchist cells were broken up; revolutionary demagogues returned to their anxious parents. Much-loved tenement buildings were deemed unfit for human habitation and condemned; their inhabitants were dragged blinking and screaming from their lightless interiors by child welfare agencies. It was a disaster for the culture and economy of the valley.

The old Te Aro Councillor—a merry, gnomish old man known only as the Sheriff—did everything in his power to stop the raids, but he was thwarted by one of his own staffers: the former treasurer. This treasurer was a human rights lawyer who had long despaired of the grip that illegal drugs and obscene cults wielded in his community, and he seized the moment. It was he who informed the police that the Church of Divine Laughter, a respected doomsday sect, did not have planning permission to build their gigantic medieval siege weapons, and he who revealed the location of Ys—a shipping container, buried beneath the allotments in Tanera Park, which housed an LSD laboratory rumoured to pre-date the Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann's discovery of the drug and which was dug up and destroyed before a crowd of weeping onlookers. The Sheriff fired the treasurer then went back to his desk and suffered a massive stroke. He died, as the officiating druid at his funeral pyre said, of a broken heart.

The secretary hired a new treasurer. But the Councillor was not so easy to replace. A general election was needed, but according to the Te Aro Charter, elections in Te Aro could only be held on certain dates: Matariki, the seasonal equinoxes, or Walpurgis Night. Fortunately, the secretary explained, the autumn equinox was only two months away and then Te Aro would have a Councillor again.

Until then, the routine business of the council went on. ‘Let me introduce our new treasurer,' the secretary said, indicating a woman with dark hair seated on the far side of the fake oak table. The applicant waved and gave Ann a cheerful smile. She inclined her head slightly in his direction.

‘And here is the most important member of the interview panel,' he continued, as the door opened and another man entered. ‘The Te Aro community archivist. He's who you'll be reporting to, if your application to become assistant archivist is successful, and I cannot indicate at this point whether it will or will not.'

The applicant stood and shook the newcomer's hand. The archivist, who was middle-aged and of medium height, wore a tweed jacket with worn elbows over an Iron Maiden concert T-shirt. He had large front teeth, a triangular face with a goatee beard, and gleaming yellow eyes. He looked a bit like a goat. He sat down, indicating to the applicant that he should remain standing, then he belched. The sound suggested that the archivist's interior spaces were larger than his body could encompass.

‘So you want to be an archivist?' he said.

‘Very much so.'

The archivist looked the applicant up and down for a minute before he spoke again. ‘It is a great privilege to work in Te Aro Archive. The pay is low but the prestige'—he drew out the end of the word—‘is considerable.'

‘I understand that,' the applicant said.

‘And the requirements for this job are very special.
Verrrrry
special.' He fluttered a piece of paper. ‘The advertisement. It reads: “Entry-level position in local government. Successful applicant must be hard working, a fast learner and illiterate.”'

The applicant nodded. ‘That's right. That's me.'

‘You're really illiterate?'

‘I literally cannot read.'

‘Then how,' the archivist smirked, ‘did you read the ad?'

The applicant replied, ‘A friend read it out to me.'

‘What's this friend's name?'

‘Immanuel.'

‘How do you spell that?'

The applicant saw the trap. He smiled. ‘I don't know.'

‘Very good.' The archivist smiled back. He peered at the applicant down his round, goat-like nose and said, ‘
Verrry
good.'

The treasurer spoke up. ‘Can I just say that an apprentice archivist who can't read makes no sense. Can I get that on the record?'

‘So noted.' The secretary looked at the archivist. ‘I've been wondering about that myself, but I didn't want to overstep my bounds. The Te Aro Charter clearly states that the archivist has sole discretion over the appointment of their apprentice. But I would also strongly advise against employing an illiterate archivist. What say you to that?'

‘I say …' The archivist tapped his long, pointed fingernails on the table. ‘That this illiterate is hired.'

‘Magnificent isn't it.' The archivist led the applicant—now, officially, his new apprentice—into the shadow cast by the archive. It was a squat, windowless, concrete building on the far side of the square from the council offices. ‘All of Te Aro's history is in here. All of its secrets. Its mysteries. Ten decades of stony sleep look down upon us.' The archivist sorted through the ring of keys that dangled from a chain on his belt. ‘Some would die for the chance to glimpse inside these walls. One or two,' he added with an ominous look, holding up a key, ‘would kill for it.'

He turned the lock.

Then he leaned his shoulder against the heavy wooden door and pushed, grunting. The door inched open and a cascade of papers and folders poured through the widening gap, spilling down the stairway. The door stuck. ‘Don't just stand there,' the archivist snapped at the apprentice, ‘help me.' The apprentice bent his shoulder to the task. Together they forced the door open and stood in the entrance to Te Aro Archive.

It was a long, gloomy room with a low ceiling. A faint, fouled light came in through a pair of dirty skylights. It lit up dozens of white metal shelves piled with boxes and books, which rose like cliffs from a sea of pages and cardboard. The sea of paper began just beyond the arc of the doorway, ankle deep, rising like a great wave to the back of the room where it towered over the shelves themselves.

‘It needs a bit of a tidy-up,' the archivist explained. ‘That's why you're here. There are a few too many rats' nests. We can hear them rustling and squeaking all the way over in the council buildings. The secretary is afraid they'll chew through the wiring and start a fire and burn the building down. I've stalled him for years, but now the new treasurer agrees with him. You know how women are about rats and fires. You've her to thank for the funding for your job.'

The archivist returned his attention to the pile. ‘There are cockroaches too, and beetles. So everything in here needs stacking or trapping or poisoning. Be careful. And above all, be on guard for the archivist's greatest enemy.'

‘Moths?'

‘Researchers.' The archivist spat out the word. ‘Journalists. Historians. Filth. This room'—he gestured at the boxes and mounds of papers; a sleek brown rat nosing along a shelf stopped as if to listen—‘might contain anything. Anything at all. So long as no one knows what is in here, all things are possible. This is what gives archivists our power. But researchers
catalogue
.' He clasped the apprentice's arm, wrapping his strong, hairy fingers around it. ‘They document. They publish. They rob the archive of its mystery, and diminish our power by increasing their own. Never let them in. Never.'

‘You don't want anyone to read anything in this archive?'

‘That's right.' His grip loosened. ‘That's why I hired you. That's why I'm trusting you with the key to this building. ‘Because of your special'—the archivist cupped the apprentice's chin with his thumb and forefinger, tilted his face up and beamed at him—‘qualities, your blessed illiteracy, my archive will remain inviolate. Its secrets will remain secret. Its mysteries will remain mysterious. Let no one in here. Do you understand?'

‘I do.'

‘Then set to work. I'll come check on you in a week. Ah—' He stopped halfway through the door. ‘What's your name?'

The apprentice told him. The archivist nodded and repeated the name. Then he was gone and Steve was alone with the rats and the beetles and the wave of paper rising out of sight into the gloom.

At last.

Steve drew a deep breath into his lungs. He savoured the damp, rat-urine-scented air, then he let it all out with a primal grunt of triumph. He twirled and bowed at the duo of rats observing him from the shelf.

At last. Te Aro Archive. After all this time.

Steve's long journey here had begun when he first arrived in Te Aro. Back then he was just an undergraduate. He had taken a job at the university library over the summer, and his experiences there set him on the path to the forbidden world of Te Aro Archive.

Steve's first task that summer was to stocktake. He had to count all the books in the library, level by level. He started on the top floor—history and geology—and began counting. Book by book. Shelf by shelf. Row by row. But by the time he reached the second row, Steve was bored. By the third row, he was mutinous. How dare the librarians delegate such a dull, mind-numbing task to a man of Steve's unique gifts? What a waste of his phenomenal potential. It was an outrage. He wouldn't do it.

He couldn't tell the librarians that, of course, because then they wouldn't pay him. No. Instead he'd estimate the number. Simply count the books in a shelf, multiply that by the number of shelves in a row, the number of rows in an aisle and the number of aisles on a floor. That would give a roughly accurate estimate in a fraction of the time. Steve could spend the rest of the day sleeping in a toilet cubicle.

His plan did have one flaw. Steve also got bored counting the number of rows and aisles, and in the end he just guessed them too. So when he reported to his supervisor at the end of the day, his voice cracked and eyes bleary from his seven-hour nap, she compared his guess for the top floor with that of the previous year's stocktake, and found that it was out by several thousand.

‘It's obvious what's happened here,' Steve replied, rolling his head to unkink his neck. ‘This is a daunting task and last year's stocktaker obviously wasn't up for it. They must have guessed a number, so of course it doesn't match up to the actual count.'

‘I did the stocktake last year,' the supervisor replied. Then she leaned forward and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial hush. ‘You're right. I did just guess the numbers.'

Steve reflected on this as he walked home that night. Libraries were repositories of knowledge, of information. Yet they couldn't obtain basic information about the nature of the knowledge they held. It was impossible to count all of the books. Even if someone did so and the number was accurate, there was no way to know it. It would have to be verified, and any verification would surely be wrong. Steve nodded thoughtfully to himself as he absorbed this insight. He had learned something important about the world.

It was a lesson the Head Librarian herself had failed to master. She was a large woman with short hair and dangly earrings. Every Monday morning she addressed the staff with an inspirational speech impressing upon them the importance of their work. Human knowledge was a tapestry, she told them, and libraries were the thread knitting the tapestry together, connecting all the wisdom into a vast and beautiful whole. Steve shook his head in disbelief at her hubris. A tapestry of human wisdom? This woman couldn't even count her own books.

Steve finished the stocktake in record time, so he was promoted to the collection and cataloguing department. His responsibility was postgraduate publications. When students submitted a completed thesis or a doctorate to the library, Steve entered it in the catalogue and shelved it.

Steve did not care for these postgraduate students. So proud of themselves and their accomplishments; so smug about their contributions to human thought. What became of all their endeavours? Nothing, Steve decided. To prove this point he carefully misspelled the names and titles of every piece of work submitted and he misshelved every item in the remotest reaches of the library. If knowledge was a tapestry it was tattered; a thing of scraps and holes.

Eventually the summer came to an end. Steve's contract was not renewed, despite his excellent performance record: the library's administrators had determined that the vast shortfall in books over the last year pointed to large-scale theft of texts, and they reallocated the funds to improve security. This too pleased Steve, although he was disappointed to lose access to the toilet in the closed stacks, a cosy room that no one else visited, where he could doze for hours listening to the rumble of the central heating, feeling the vast number of books in the uncountable shelves all around him and knowing that they represented both wisdom and entropy, knowledge and disinformation.

One of Steve's psychology courses that year involved fieldwork. ‘Go out into the community,' the students were told. ‘Find people who have been diagnosed with mental illnesses. Hear their stories. They have much to teach us.'

So he wandered around Aro Valley, pestering its homeless population and asking them to talk to him, or at least sign a form saying that they had so he could get course credit. But it was hard. Most of the vagrants in the valley were already the subjects of academic studies by sociologists and economists and anthropologists, and they'd signed non-competition clauses. Only one vagrant was unattached: a friendly but occasionally violent drunk called Strawberry. He was a ruddy-faced man with shoulder-length blond hair. He wore an orange hooded sweatshirt that reached down to his knees, and a pair of jandals. He lived beneath a stairway outside an abandoned shop, in an area he'd partitioned off with a wall of discarded amateur artworks: paintings of storm clouds and dead trees and melting children; giant dolphin sculptures.

‘I don't sign contracts,' he told Steve, waving away his course form. ‘But I can teach you a thing or two about life. Here.' He reached for Steve's hand. ‘Put the tip of your finger between my teeth.'

Steve withdrew his hand and stepped behind a rusting trolley. ‘Maybe later,' he demurred. ‘Why don't you tell me your story first?'

‘Smart kid.' Strawberry grinned, revealing a row of teeth filed down into fangs. He sat on the bottom step and began to talk.

He'd once had a job, Strawberry explained. And a house. A family. A life. He was a journalist right here in Te Aro. But he asked the wrong questions. Angered the wrong people.

‘What happened?' Steve asked him.

In response, Strawberry pointed down the valley. ‘You see that building?' He indicated a squat concrete structure on the far side of the park. ‘That's Te Aro Archive. Everything that's happened in this valley is recorded in there. Every election. Every crime. Every secret. There are places like the archive everywhere. Libraries. Halls of Record. Bureaucracies. Data warehouses. They have dossiers. Databases. Files. They're supposed to contain information about the world, about us.' He swept his arm towards the buildings, the road, the valley, Steve himself. ‘All of this. But somewhere along the way, the relationship reversed. The information no longer describes us. Now
we
describe
it
. If it changes, reality changes. You might think you own your own house, but if your bank's information about you changes'—he snapped his fingers—‘you're out on the street. And if all our information disappears …' He lit a cigarette and uncrossed his legs, revealing that he wasn't wearing any shorts or underwear beneath his baggy sweater. ‘Well, we disappear. That's what happened to me.'

Strawberry was right, Steve thought, as he made his way home to type up his interview notes. Information about reality dictated reality. His experiences in the library proved that. But if Steve could manipulate the university library, what was to stop some individual or group doing that on a massive scale? To cities? Nations? Countries? All of reality itself?

Nothing. It had happened. Steve knew, therefore it was happening; now, all around. And he might never prove that this conspiracy was real. By its very nature there would be no evidence; indeed, the lack of evidence was irrefutable proof of this conspiracy's existence.

Steve decided to search anyway. The next day he went looking for Strawberry to find out more about his nonexistent past. But Strawberry was gone. The official story was that he had gone into the Capital and bitten off a policeman's fingertip and was then committed to a secure psychiatric unit but Steve knew the truth. He'd been locked away because he knew too much.

Next, Steve tried Te Aro Archive. A sign on the door read ‘No Admittance to Anyone Under Any Circumstances'. Steve phoned the council and spoke to the archivist, many times: the archive was always closed, and there was always an excuse: earthquake strengthening, asbestos, radiation leaks.

Steve continued with his studies. He finished his honours degree and began his doctorate. But he never forgot Strawberry, or the archive, or the plot against reality, which was everywhere and nowhere. He made a list of all the thinkers and visionaries who might have known about the plot. They could never say anything out loud, of course, but they hinted at it in their works. Painters. Poets. Psychics. Steve had his contacts at the library set alerts on books by these individuals. Anyone reading certain combinations of these texts would be flagged to Steve's attention.

Then, about a year ago, Verity's name tripped one of these alarms. Steve made contact with her hapless boyfriend, Danyl. He gathered intelligence about Verity. He went to her house while she was out and watched daytime TV with Danyl. He ate her leftover food. He went to the opening of her photography exhibition, and when he heard her describe her work, all of Steve's suspicions were validated. Verity was involved in a plot against reality.

Shortly after this discovery, Steve's life was rocked by a series of catastrophes. Verity vanished. Danyl was taken into custody and sent out of the valley. The cult that Steve was studying for his doctoral work disintegrated, and Steve himself was dismissed from his department, his enemies on the university ethics committee picking their moment to strike while Steve was distracted by all this turmoil.

That's how Steve found himself in the faculty office, flanked by two security guards waiting to escort him from the campus, while an associate dean gave him career advice. Steve's teaching methods were unacceptable, the associate dean explained, but the university had generously decided not to file a police complaint, so Steve could still consider a career as a secondary school teacher, and the faculty would provide a reference. Was he interested?

Steve was not. He wasn't listening to the associate dean. His eyes had drifted to the noticeboard outside the glass office, and an ad in the Situations Vacant that began ‘Illiterate Wanted'. The ad bore the logo of Te Aro Community Council.

And here Steve was, at long last. He waited for the archivist's footsteps to die away. Then he picked up a large cardboard box and blockaded the door with it. Best to take precautions.

He picked up a random folder from the pile at his feet, blew the dust and mouse droppings off it and read: ‘Minutes of Te Aro Council Meeting: All Hallows Eve, 1982.' He sighed a deep satisfied sigh and began to read.

Steve wasn't sure what he was looking for. He knew there was something wrong with the world, something rotten at its core. He'd been lied to; everyone had. But he wasn't sure who had lied about what, or why. But there were answers in the archive and he would find them.

He spent the first week cleaning. Before he could learn anything he needed to impose some order; teach the rodents and beetles who was boss. He worked his way through the sea of papers to the first row of shelves, sorting and stacking and poisoning as he went. The archivist checked on him from time to time, monitoring his progress, but these visits became less frequent. In the second week they stopped altogether.

That's when Steve's research began. He smuggled pens and notebooks into the building. He read minutes and reports. He scoured boundary maps. He studied the findings of property inspectors, engineers and dowsers, all commissioned by the council for various reports over the years.

He learned many things. He learned that the geology of the Aro Valley was very different from that of the surrounding region. The bedrock beneath most of the Capital was composed of strata of recent volcanic rock, but the earth beneath Te Aro consisted of ancient crystalline basement sediments laid down in the Precambrian Era. This meant that the Aro Valley was one of the last surviving parts of Vaalbara, the Earth's mysterious and sinister first supercontinent. No one knew what had happened to Vaalbara, or how and why the fragments of it comprising the bedrock below the valley had survived the tectonic shifts of the eons. Was this related to the plot? Or was it just a distraction? He marked the geological surveys as suspicious but interesting, and moved on.

Steve also discovered who owned most of the property in Te Aro. Although the area was slowly gentrifying, most of the houses, still old and poorly maintained, were owned by slumlords. The wealthiest of these slumlords had died many years ago, Steve learned, but his death was kept secret because the mad old man bequeathed all of his estate to a handsome cabbage tree not far from the public toilets on Aro Street. Did that mean the public owned the land? No one knew. What happened if the tree died, or was killed by its angry tenants, of whom there were many—for, in truth, the tree was an indifferent landlord. No one knew the answer to that, either, and as property values in the valley soared, the tree grew ever more wealthy and powerful.

Much else that Steve read was dull. Lists of expenses. Transcripts of councillors bickering over what to name public benches or alleyways. Trivia. And none of it, not even the revelations about the cabbage tree or the Vaalbara supercontinent, brought Steve closer to what he was really looking for. Proof of the plot against reality.

By the end of his third week as apprentice archivist, he was halfway across the room and the frozen wave of papers and folders stood at head height. It needed to be barricaded with boxes and braces jerry-rigged from broken shelves. It creaked and groaned as Steve laid out grids of documents across the floor beneath its shadow, trying to make sense of the chaotic bureaucratic intricacies of sixty years of community business.