Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (18 page)

There was a blue envelope taped to one of the doors. Kim tugged it free, inspected it and held it out to Steve. ‘Baal chring.'

Steve's name was on the envelope.

Dear Steve
,

Gorgon wishes to meet with you. Today. Te Aro Archive. 12 pm. Come on time and come alone, with no companions or substitutes or tricks, or everything you care about will be destroyed, utterly
.

Yours
,

A Friend
.

‘It's a trap,' said the secretary.

Steve agreed and was about to say so, but the secretary wasn't done. ‘Look there,' he said, pointing at the note. ‘It tells you to meet Gorgon at 12 pm. But that's impossible. There's no such thing as 12 pm.'

‘Isn't 12 pm twelve noon?'

‘No.' The secretary shook his head, saddened by Steve's ignorance. ‘PM stands for post meridiem. After the meridiem. But twelve is the meridiem. How can you have a time that is both the meridiem and past the meridiem? You can't. It's a logical impossibility.'

Steve turned his back on the secretary and showed Kim the note. ‘I think this is a trap,' he said. ‘However, if we know it's a trap then it ceases to become one.'

‘Kanb.'

‘And if we go and spring this trap we can get something to eat on the way.'

‘Ere kanb.'

‘Then it's decided.' He rubbed this hands together. ‘I'll do exactly as this note says. I'll go to the archive all right. Alone, with no tricks or substitutes. But with one slight, subtle twist.'

~

Steve sat cross-legged on the roof of the Community Hall, watching Kim and the secretary approach the archive.

The park and the Community Hall were deserted. Clouds hung low about the hills. No one had entered or left the archive in the two hours Steve had it under observation.

Kim and the secretary neared the entrance. The doorway was recessed into the wall of the concrete bunker, atop a short flight of steps. Steve's troops hesitated before it. They looked back at him; he gave them a cheerful thumbs-up and flapped his hands, urging them into the darkness.

Kim tried the door. It opened. Steve sipped his soup, which he had purchased from Sufi Soup on his way to the meeting. He'd promised Kim and the secretary soup of their own if their mission was successful. Hunger will sharpen your wits, he assured them.

He'd worked out a series of signals with the secretary. ‘If you enter the archive and it turns out to be a trap, which it will, scream “It's a trap” and try to run away,' Steve instructed. ‘If someone drugs you with DoorWay, scream “I'm drugged”. If someone electroshocks you with a taser, scream “I've been electroshocked with a taser”. Or just scream. If Gorgon herself is inside, scream twice. Got it?'

‘I have,' the secretary replied. ‘But there's a problem. Gorgon is still, technically, the legal Councillor of Te Aro. I work for her. If she's in the archive then I can't betray her by signalling you.'

‘I see your problem.' Steve thought for a moment. ‘I have it. If Gorgon's inside, come back out but don't signal. You're not betraying her by not signalling, are you?'

‘Isn't not signalling a form of signal? Wouldn't that still be a betrayal?'

Steve sighed. ‘Just signal then. Why does everything have to be so complicated?'

‘I won't betray the rightful Councillor,' the secretary declared. ‘I won't signal.'

‘Then not signalling will be the signal. Now go. Hurry!'

Steve waited as his troops shuffled closer to the archive entrance. While he waited, he wondered who had left that note for him in the abandoned garage. Gorgon or one of her lieutenants? How had they known Steve would end up there? There were many secret entrances to the catacombs, and Steve had chosen the path to the garage at random. Impossible to predict. Yet they had. How?

Also, why set a trap in the archive? If they could predict his movements then why not set a trap for him back in the tunnels? And why make it so obvious? Did Gorgon underestimate Steve's leadership qualities? His tactical brilliance and willingness to sacrifice his entire team by sending them directly into an ambush? Or was something else playing out here? Schemes within schemes, plans within plans?

Something else nagged at Steve. He'd seen something during his raid on the bookshop: something significant, but he didn't know what. His subconscious needled him. He tried to think, to focus. It might be important …

Then he heard the first scream.

It was Kim. A series of nonsense words tapering into an incoherent cry of terror which hung in the air for a moment then died away. Steve drank some more soup and waited. Kim's cowardly howls could mean anything. Steve was relying on the secretary to transmit meaningful information.

Then the secretary appeared. He emerged from the shadows of the archive doorway and stood, blinking in the sunlight. He looked up at Steve. Steve chewed his bread and looked back.

The secretary did not make a signal. Steve nodded to show that he understood. Then the secretary pitched forward. He landed face down, a dart embedded between his shoulder blades.

Did that mean Gorgon was inside? Or just that the secretary couldn't signal because he was drugged? Steve didn't know. The secretary had botched the operation. Typical. At least they now knew that the archive was a trap.

Sipping his soup, he planned his next move. He'd remain here on the roof, out of sight, and see who emerged from the archive. Next he'd follow Gorgon, or whoever it was, back to their lair. Then he'd rescue some more pilgrims from the Real City, somehow, and train them up as shock troops. Good ones, this time. Then he'd strike a decisive blow of some kind.

Steve waited. Minutes crawled by. He looked at the secretary sprawled on the concrete. Why didn't they move him? Were they using him as bait? Did they think Steve would break cover to rescue his fallen comrade? Were they that naive?

Then he noticed movement in the corner of his vision. There was someone in the park. He ducked down behind the peak of the roof.

It was a giant, loping through the trees. The same giant Steve had encountered yesterday in the bookshop. It stopped in the middle of the great lawn, took something from its pocket and looked at it, then corrected its direction, heading for the Community Hall.

Watching the giant, something plucked softly at Steve's memory. The elusive thought that had been nagging him returned.
You saw something
, it whispered.
Something in the bookshop. Something important
.

Steve cast his mind back to the raid, replaying the scene. They burst into the room. Stunned Sophus and the archivist. Grabbed the suitcase. Fought with the giant. Fled into the labyrinth. Steve's memory recreated each instant with eidetic detail. He was attacked by the giant, hauled up into the air. Interrogated. Then dropped …

There! Steve froze the moment in his mind and zoomed in. He was lying on the ground while Kim and the secretary fought the giant. And in the periphery of Steve's vision was a second man, kneeling on a mattress in the giant's great shadow; one of the so-called pilgrims lured into the bookshop to be drugged and trapped in the Real City. The man's face was partially obscured by an outflung hand but Steve could see that his mouth was open; the man was clearly stunned by the violence exploding around him. Steve flipped through more images in his mind, trying to find a clearer picture of the man, and when he did he gasped.

The man kneeling on the mattress next to the giant was Danyl.

Danyl. Poor, sad Danyl. He was supposed to be far away in a facility somewhere: medicated, shuffling around in a daze, performing basic menial tasks: mowing lawns, cleaning toilets. Yet he was here in the valley finding his way into sinister bookshops and fraternising with giants. He'd broken free. Steve felt a surge of pride for his old friend, tempered with concern. Where was Danyl now? Trapped in the Real City? Or wandering the streets of Te Aro, helpless and vulnerable and afraid? Steve needed to find him.

He called out to the giant. ‘Hey there!' The creature ignored him. It strode past the council building, and Steve waved at it and called out again. No response. It strode up to the archive, glanced at the secretary on the ground, and then called into the darkness beyond the doorway, ‘Joy?'

Joy? Who was Joy? Steve had to stop the giant from entering the archive. He grabbed Lightbringer. He slid down the rooftop, lowered himself from its edge, and dropped. He landed on the ground and rolled, sustaining moderate injuries to his left ankle, both legs, his right hip, lower back and left shoulder. Then he was up, limping after the giant, commanding him to stop in the name of the Subcommittee for Public Safety.

But he was too late. The giant stepped over the secretary's body and through the doorway into the archive. The door swung shut behind it. Steve heard it call out ‘Joy?' again, and this was followed by a terrible roar and loud crashing that sounded to Steve like bodies being tossed against shelves, followed by running footsteps and desperate screams. The noise lasted for about thirty seconds. There was a final scream of ‘Joy!', a final patter of footsteps, then silence.

Steve approached the building. He stood outside the entrance and listened. His powerful ears heard birds. Insects. Distant cars. But nothing from inside.

He opened the door and entered the archive.

Danyl woke.

He lay on a cold floor. A blanket was draped over his body. He craned his neck and looked around.

He was in a large sunlit room. The floor was tiled. The tiles continued halfway up the wall: they'd been white once, but were now stained and chipped. The ceiling was high overhead. There were no windows. The light came in through a glass skylight which was cracked and mottled with mould.

He tried to stand and was disappointed to learn that he couldn't because his left wrist was chained to a pipe. The pipe protruded from the wall and ran to a stainless steel bath at the far end of the room. There was a door nearby. The air smelled damp. It was very cold.

Where was he? Danyl tried to think. He remembered … Ye Undergrounde Bookshoppe. The catacombs. Stumbling out of the culvert. The Threshold development, and the ruined townhouse filled with bodies. Fleeing from the Cartographers. He remembered the house from Verity's photograph. The grave. Then the goat-faced man shot him with a dart-gun; reality drained away and he found himself in the Real City.

Once Danyl recovered from the shock of reality disappearing and being replaced with something utterly alien, he examined his surroundings. It appeared to be a vast plaza. He counted the pathways branching off from it. There were 136 with a blank space where the 137th should have been. When he stood before it, he could make out a tiny black spot in the far distance.

The Spiral.

He headed towards it. The Spiral grew larger, but then he passed through a succession of plazas that took him further away from it until it was out of sight. He tried to retrace his steps; he wandered down immeasurable paths until suddenly the Real City faded and the world knit itself together in front of his eyes, and he found himself lying in this decaying bathroom, handcuffed to the plumbing.

It was good to be back in good old reality again, even if he didn't know quite which bit of reality he was imprisoned in. One of the half-finished townhouses at Threshold, he guessed.

Well, Danyl figured, now that he was awake he should probably try to escape. He inspected the steel handcuff, tapping it with his fingertips and rattling it against the pipe. It looked exactly like a handcuff in the movies. The steel seemed very strong.

What about the pipe? One end led to the bath, the other to the wash-basin. He stood and tugged with his cuffed hand, theorising that he could tear the pipe out of the wall. It did not move and the cuff bit into the flesh of his wrist. It really hurt.

Escape was clearly impossible. Danyl decided to wait and see what his captors had in store for him. He leaned against the wash-basin, crossed his legs and made himself comfortable, then patted his belly, wondering when a Cartographer would be along to feed him.

Someone grunted.

The sound came from the bath. Danyl craned his neck and tried to see over the rim. There was a green wool blanket inside the bath, covering something bulky. Another grunt. The blanket shifted. There was someone underneath it.

Danyl called out, ‘Are you OK? Can you hear me? I can't help you. I'm chained to a pipe.'

The only answer was more grunting. And maybe it was the acoustics of the room, but it sounded like the grunting of a very large man. The blanket shifted again and Danyl watched in transfixed horror as the blanket rose to the top of the bath, slipping back to reveal an enormous black leather boot with blood-red stitching, which came to rest on the rim.

Danyl recognised that boot. It was the giant's. The creature must have been drugged, just like Danyl, and dumped in the bathtub, and now the drug was wearing off. Danyl's thoughts became very calm and very focused. He had to get out of this bathroom. The beast might wake any second.

Danyl examined the cabinet below the wash-basin. The pipe entered it through a hole in the side. He opened the cabinet door. The pipe attached to a mixer unit where it joined a second pipe, which disappeared into the wall. All Danyl needed to do was disassemble the mixer, pull the pipe out of the cabinet and slip his handcuff loose.

He lay on the floor in an L-shape, his head and torso inside the cabinet. The pipe was bolted to the mixer and did not shift when Danyl twisted it with his fingers, so he tugged off his belt, laid the metal clasps of the buckle flat against the top of the bolt, wrapped the strap around it and pulled.

The bolt gave. Water spilled out from the join between the mixer and the pipe. Danyl pulled again; the pipe jolted and came loose, sending a high-pressure stream of water gushing into the confined space of the wash-basin. It was difficult to wrestle the pipe out through the hole, since Danyl's mouth and eyes were filled with very cold water, but he managed it. Once it was free of the cabinet, he forced it down to the floor and the handcuff slipped off.

Free Danyl! He picked up his belt and looped it through his pants, regarded himself in the mirror and rewarded his reflection with a triumphant thumbs up, then splashed across the rapidly spreading pool of water to the door. Which was locked from the outside.

That made sense: Danyl was a prisoner, after all. But, he reasoned, it couldn't be too hard to break the door down. If it was impregnable then his captor wouldn't have bothered to cuff him to the pipe. Danyl shoved at the door. It shuddered a little, but held firm. He kicked it. Nothing. He waded to the opposite wall—the water was already ankle-deep and rising fast—and ran at the door, slamming into it with his shoulder. He bounced off it and fell into the water, sending waves splashing against the walls.

He climbed to his knees, his clothes soaked. He looked around the room looking for something, anything that could help him escape.

There was the wash-basin. The pipe. The toilet. The bathtub, with the blanket and the massive boot with the blood-red stitching, and the groans getting louder. Danyl forced himself to keep calm, think rationally. He waited for inspiration as the water rose to his knees and then his waist. But nothing came, and the water reached the rim of the bath and spilled into it. The groans from inside the bath transformed to roars. There was no way out of the room and the giant was waking. Its massive legs kicked in the air, then its boots found purchase on the side of the bath. It began to rise.

Danyl panicked. He let out a roar of his own and flung himself at the blanket and rained blows upon it.