Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (17 page)

‘Aren't you afraid?'

Steve stood in the torchlit darkness of the Waimapihi Tunnel. He was at the mouth of a passageway, one foot on the plank of wood that spanned the swift, dark waters. The stream was high, surging along the culvert. At the other end of the bridge was Sophus.

Two weeks had passed since Steve had awoken from the Real City. It had taken him days to fully recover, but after a brutal regime of pasta-eating and power-sleeping he was back at the height of his powers. And he was in total command of his strike force, the Subcommittee for Public Safety.

Steve had rescued his shock troops from his house and they'd recovered alongside him. For the past few nights they'd scouted the catacombs: the network of tunnels beneath Te Aro. They'd discovered an alternate entrance to the network via an abandoned sub-station on Epuni Street: a rusty ladder fixed into the rock led down to a narrow corridor that joined with the passageway connecting the basements of the Aro Street apartment buildings. They ventured as far as the stormwater tunnel, but that seemed to be a thoroughfare for the Cartographers. Dozens of them regularly passed back and forth along the accessway beside the stream; some carried bodies on stretchers, others lugged boxes along the platform. Steve and his subcommittee kept out of sight. They lurked in the darkness, spying, eavesdropping. Piecing together the Cartographers' evil plan.

During the early hours of the morning the Cartographers distributed blue envelopes and fake spiral dollars around the valley. The denizens of the valley found the dollars and the maps and the clues, and followed them to the bookshop, which was now something even worse than a bookshop.

It was a trap.

The bookshop was the crossing point to the Real City. Those who made their way there were drugged and taken away through the tunnels to an as-yet-unknown destination.

Why? What was the point of Gorgon's plan? Steve didn't know. What he did know was that he needed to stop it; cripple Gorgon's organisation. Strike at the weak point. And he'd succeeded. His raid on the bookshop had captured a suitcase full of DoorWay compound while simultaneously stopping Sophus and the archivist from snaring more victims.

Unfortunately, one of the victims they'd saved back there was a confused, angry giant, and he'd hurt Steve quite badly and delayed their getaway, allowing Sophus and the archivist to recover from the attack and chase them down the tunnel. Steve led the subcommittee right past the ladder leading up to the sub-station—they'd never make it up there in time—and down to the underground stream. They ran alongside it, through the roaring darkness. Now he stood on the plank bridging the Waimapihi. At his back was a narrow flight of steps leading to regions of the catacombs unmapped by Steve.

‘We're not scared of Gorgon,' he called out to Sophus, who stood on the opposite side of the stream, one foot on the plank.

‘Then you're a fool.'

Steve smirked behind his mask. ‘Would a fool do this?' He took his stolen suitcase filled with DoorWay and held it over the rushing stream. Sophus gasped and took an involuntary step across the plank, his arms outstretched.

‘Uh-uh.' Steve held up his hand. ‘That's far enough, Cartographer. Either get back off this bridge and stop following us, or I throw Gorgon's precious vials into the water. What'll it be?'

Sophus stepped back. He addressed Steve in a low, trembling voice. ‘You can't take our compound. You don't understand what we're doing here. How important it is—'

‘I'm not here to understand things,' Steve snarled. ‘I'm here to stop you.'

‘I understand your anger,' Sophus said. ‘I was once like you. They tricked me and trapped me in the Real City. But then I woke up and they explained everything.'

‘They brainwashed you.'

‘They told me the truth.'

‘Ha! What do mathematicians know about truth? Get off the bridge or your precious compound goes in the water!'

Sophus licked his lips. ‘All right. But let's make a deal. We need this plank to cross the stream, for our work.' He swept his torchbeam over the plank. ‘If we promise not to follow you, will you promise to leave it in place? As a gesture of good faith.'

Steve considered the offer. ‘All right,' he agreed, covertly placing the toe of his shoe beneath the plank. ‘Good faith.'

Steve and his subcommittee reached the top of the steps when they heard someone scream, followed by a loud splash.

‘Sounds like one of the Cartographers is mapping the stream,' said Steve. His shock troops laughed.

Steve glanced back at his troops, remembering their escape from captivity. After he'd stunned Eleanor with the taser, he hurried inside and scraped together a syringeful of DoorWay to drug her with. But she was tougher then she looked. By the time Steve returned, she'd picked herself up out of the mud and escaped. She would go for reinforcements, he knew. Return with hordes of Cartographers and try to recapture him. He needed to get out. Fast.

But then he'd heard a groan from the lounge. Then another: a cry for help. Two voices. Two captives were awake. If Steve was lucky he could rescue them both; drag them across the yard and into the trees, out of sight. Get them somewhere safe, then train them up.

That's what he did, and now those two handpicked soldiers trotted along behind Steve as they made their way through the catacombs. The first one said, ‘I wonder if these tunnels are gazetted in the Te Aro Charter?' and the second replied, ‘Piperfant cunang.'

Steve would have preferred to go into battle with someone other than the Council secretary and Kim, Steve's former opponent in the election campaign. Anyone else, really. But great military leaders worked with the elite strike force they had. And they had acquitted themselves well against the giant.

‘I wonder if the legitimacy of our subcommittee extends down here,' the secretary continued. ‘Are we still in Te Aro? Do you think we've exceeded our authority?'

Steve did not reply. He was concentrating on getting them back to the surface. They came to a fork in the tunnel. Steve believed in making irrational decisions based on intuition and instinct—it made him unpredictable to his enemies—so he swerved to the left without stopping and continued downwards, noting, briefly, that the other passageway sloped up.

Something nagged at him. He felt he'd seen something important back in the bookshop, some detail or clue, but he didn't know what. His powerful subconscious urged him to stop and think about it. But they didn't have time. They needed to flee. Meanwhile the secretary continued to muse aloud. ‘The legal principle here, I think, is
Cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos
. Whoever owns the soil it is theirs all the way to heaven and down to hell,' he translated. ‘But that is a principle of property law, not government, and even so I've never been happy with it. Does the council's authority extend all the way through the Earth's core to the surface on the opposite side of the planet? Preposterous. And, since it mentions heaven and hell, what about the Real City? Does our authority extend there?'

‘Of course not,' Steve replied. The tunnel he'd chosen seemed to be leading deeper into the earth, and he wondered if they should turn back, pick the other direction. No: he couldn't second-guess himself in front of his troops. If they lost confidence in him, the entire subcommittee could fall apart. ‘Pick up the pace,' he called, and they hurried down into the dark behind him.

‘Why wouldn't we have legal authority over the Real City?' the secretary demanded. ‘It's a legal territory accessed and located within the Aro Valley.'

‘The Real City isn't real,' Steve explained.

‘Why not? We all saw it. The exact same spiral-haunted labyrinth, down to the smallest detail.'

‘We only saw it because they drugged us.'

‘You only hear radio broadcasts if you intercept the waves with a conductor. That doesn't mean they aren't there.'

‘Taking DoorWay is like reading a novel,' Steve explained. ‘The words are real, just like the drug. But when people read they experience profound hallucinations, and the hallucinations are the same, but that doesn't make the contents of the book real. Destroy all the physical books and the contents are destroyed. That's what we're going to do to the Real City. We defeat Gorgon and destroy the drug and the City vanishes.'

The secretary frowned. ‘By that logic, if we stay within these caves and seal off the outside world so that we can never reach it, does the outside world cease to be real?'

‘Yes,' said Steve.

‘Larlet,' said Kim.

‘Speaking of the outside world, we seem to be moving away from it. Are we lost?'

‘We are not lost,' Steve assured him. ‘We're just exploring alternative routes.' He paused when they came to another fork in the tunnel. He chose a direction at random and said, ‘This way has a good feel about it.' He led his troops down it.

The downward slope became steeper. The air seemed colder. Eventually the secretary said, ‘We're not in an access tunnel anymore.' He played his torch over the walls. They were stone, roughly hacked. The floor was smooth. ‘There used to be a quarry in Aro Valley, back in the late nineteenth century,' he continued. ‘It was mostly open cast, but they dug a few tunnels looking for ores, and this must be one of them. How interesting. And what do you think that terrible stench is?'

Steve had noticed it too: an alien yet oddly familiar smell that grew stronger, more pungent the deeper they went. His powerful nose identified the odour of brine along with complex aromatic compounds. Whatever was down there was metallic and old.

Then they came to the end. The tunnel terminated in a wall of bricks. Diagonal wooden beams braced the wall, set against the hard stone floor. The three men swept their torchbeams over the structure.

‘The tunnel keeps going past this wall,' the secretary said. ‘You can feel the breeze.' He held his hand up near the roof of the tunnel. ‘And you can see the gaps around the edges.'

‘What's that?' Steve directed his beam of light to the side of the tunnel. There was something scratched into the stone. Words. Names carved into the rock.

‘Elizas McKenzie.' The secretary read them aloud. ‘Augustus Conway. Loyal Smith. Victorian names. Probably the masons who carved the tunnel.'

‘Qlip.'

‘This wall isn't Victorian, though.' Steve rested his palm against it. The bricks were dry and cold. He saw something gleam in the darkness at its base and knelt down to find a wooden clipboard hanging from a rusty nail. There was a single piece of paper on the board; time and the dry air had curled it into a scroll. Steve took a latex glove from his jacket pocket, snapped it on and gently flattened the page. The edges crumbled at his touch.

It was an official form from the Department of Works and Engineering. The underlined heading read ‘Completion Sheet'. Beneath that, ‘Building or Structure: Underground Reinforced Wall'. Beneath that: ‘Note name of senior inspecting engineer, time, date and any comments.' Beneath this were columns corresponding to those headings, but the page was blank except for a single entry. ‘M. Ogilvy. 16/08/1974'.

‘Sutala,' said Kim. He nudged Steve and pointed up at the roof.

The tunnel above their heads was curved, and rent by fissures that swallowed the light. Between these were smooth planes covered with carved pictures: stick figures, some standing, most of them lying down; above the figures were vague sketches: lines, vast shapes. A wave of fear ran through Steve's heart. He knew now that they were looking at a rough depiction of the Real City. Looming over the sleeping stick figures and the plazas and bridges of the City was a shape, half concealed by the brick wall: a brooding, malignant pattern.

The Spiral.

‘Daylight!'

‘Pluqentoil!'

Steve saw it too. A faint wash of blue colouring the dark. They all cried out and stumbled towards it.

They'd wandered the tunnels for many hours, until Steve had begun to doubt his own leadership skills. Now he felt vindicated. He hadn't led them to a lingering death in the darkness after all.

The tunnel sloped upwards, narrowing. As they trudged on, the light resolved into a series of faint blue outlines illuminating a pile of bulky, square boxes blocking the exit.

The secretary climbed to the top of the pile, throwing up clouds of dust. ‘It's someone's garage,' he called down. ‘I don't think anyone's been in here for years.'

They cleared a path through the boxes and emerged into a double garage filled with rusting car parts, garden tools and obsolete electrical appliances. The garage's roller doors were shut. Sheets of Perspex in the roof admitted a murky, underwater light.

Steve picked his way through the debris covering the floor, knelt by the doors and tugged it up.

He recognised his surroundings immediately. Central Te Aro. Boston Terrace. The sun was hidden behind dense cloud and the shadows were vague. Steve estimated that the time was 9.28 am.

‘The Cartographers will be looking for this.' He held up the stolen suitcase filled with DoorWay. ‘They'll watch the streets. We need to hide until dark.' He gestured at the garage littered with rusting lawnmower blades, the air heavy with the stink of petrol and paint-thinner. ‘This seems like a good place to hole up. Everyone get some rest.'

‘What about food?' the secretary asked.

‘Vlay,' added Kim.

‘What about it?'

‘We haven't eaten in about sixteen hours. We're pretty hungry.'

‘Hunger is just a very powerful physical craving,' Steve explained. ‘Try to ignore it.' He frowned at Kim, who was heading towards the roller doors. ‘Where are you going, soldier? You have your orders.'

Kim pointed at something. Steve squinted in the light and stepped closer.