Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (2 page)

‘Hey!'

Danyl grunted awake. He was spreadeagled in the entrance to Te Aro Archive. The sky was dark but the horizon was flushed with light. Someone leaned over him: a hand fumbled against his face. A woman said, ‘Hello? Hello?'

Danyl slapped the hand away. If you slept outside you often woke to find people interfering with you. He'd learned to be firm with them. ‘Leave me alone,' he warned the woman. ‘Or I'll scream.'

She stepped back, admitting a little pre-dawn light into the alcove, and said, ‘You can't sleep here. This is council property. You're polluting our alcove.' She prodded him with something hard. He whimpered and sat up. ‘You are stealing value from the ratepayers of Te Aro,' she told him, prodding him again. ‘You are—wait. Are you Danyl?'

‘Yeah. Well, maybe. Who wants to know?'

She drew closer but not too close. ‘Danyl! It is you!'

This woman was tall with medium-length black hair parted on one side. Her hair fell over the other half of her face in a dark wave. She wore a black shirt, a long wool dress and a black raincoat. She held an aluminium golf club in one hand and a white leather purse in the other. Once, Danyl would have been struck by her beauty. He would have scrambled to his feet, smoothed his hair, tried to ingratiate himself with this woman by making her laugh, trying to win her approval, apologising for polluting her alcove. But that was the old Danyl. Six months of powerful antidepressants had cured him of this cowardice before beauty by ridding him of any sexual impulses, and even though he'd been off his drugs for a week the effect still lingered. It gave him perspective. Wisdom. He didn't have to debase himself before someone just because she had pretty eyes and a nice figure. Not anymore. He sat up, drew his head back and said in a cold voice, ‘Do I know you?'

‘We've never met,' the woman replied. ‘But it's very fortunate that I've found you.' She extended her hand for Danyl to shake. Then her eyes flicked to his forehead and she drew it back. ‘There are insects in your hair.'

Danyl tipped his head forward and brushed his scalp with his fingertips. ‘Those are just spiders,' he explained as they dropped to the ground and scuttled away. ‘You get them when you sleep outdoors. They're attracted to the warmth.'

‘That's horrible. You shouldn't have to live like this.' The woman's face was a mixture of arachnophobia and genuine sorrow. Danyl glared at her. All he wanted was to sink back down on the concrete step and close his eyes. ‘Did you want something?' He didn't try to hide his hostility. ‘You seem to know who I am, but I've never seen you before, and if you don't mind'—he gestured at the spiders scurrying across his pillow—‘we're trying to sleep.'

‘But you can't sleep here. This building isn't zoned for dormancy. And it's not safe.' She glanced about, then whispered, ‘This valley is a troubled place.'

‘Troubled?'

‘Very troubled.' She leaned closer. ‘Like I said, this is a fortunate meeting. For both of us.'

‘Who are you? What do you want?'

‘I'm Ann. I'm the new Te Aro Council treasurer. I have an offer to make you. A transaction between equals. My office is just over there.' She pointed at the small warren of prefabricated offices tucked behind the hall. ‘Come. Hear what I have to say.'

‘I don't—'

A knowing smile played across her face. ‘I'll give you a muffin.'

Danyl's eyes narrowed. ‘What kind of muffin?'

‘Poppyseed.'

He flicked another spider from his earlobe. ‘Help me up.'

Ann unlocked the door leading to the council offices and led Danyl into a large, dark, low-roofed room. They waited while the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered, died, then burst into sickly life to reveal six wooden desks separated by waist-high metal partitions. The desks were covered with piles of paper and folders stacked beside dark computer screens. Each desk was messier than the last except for the one in the far corner of the room, which was bare. Danyl smelled disinfectant; this smell became stronger as Ann led him to the clean desk.

‘Have a seat. Sit anywhere. Not there, that's my seat. Don't touch it. Here.' She gestured towards a swivel chair. ‘Tea or coffee?'

‘Tea, please.'

‘Dandelion or fennel?'

‘Coffee, please.'

The kitchen was a narrow bench in the corner of the room. Ann filled a kettle and washed cups while Danyl looked around.

The room was a square with a door in each wall. One door led outside; the next through to the town hall, and the next to the toilet. The last door had a handsome brass doorknob and a brass plaque reading ‘Chamber of the Councillor', and this led into a separate building. A window in one wall looked out over the quad; the window on the opposite wall gave a view of a small private courtyard.

Ann spoke from the kitchenette. ‘I've been in Te Aro for six months. I took this job just after you went to trial. I read about you in the newspaper.'

‘The media blew all of that out of proportion.'

‘I realise that now. At the time I thought you were crazy, that they were right to commit you. But now I understand that the things you screamed at your press conference were true. There is something strange about this valley. Something malevolent, but hidden. Is that why you're back here? To destroy it?'

‘Actually I'm just here to find my girlfriend,' Danyl said. ‘Technically, ex-girlfriend.'

‘Verity? The photographer?'

‘Yes!' Danyl found his heart fluttering, beating out a complex and secret code. ‘Do you know her? Do you know where she is?'

‘No.' Ann set a crested community council mug on the desk beside Danyl then took a seat opposite him at the spotless desk. ‘She disappeared shortly after your trial. No one's seen her in months. And she isn't the only person who's missing.' She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial hush. ‘There are others. No one knows how many. People go out late at night and don't come back.'

‘Like who?'

‘All sorts.' She waved her hand at the empty room. ‘Some of my colleagues on the council staff are gone.'

‘How many?'

‘Aside from me? All of them.'

Danyl sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee. Too hot. He looked at the empty desks. They were coated in a thin layer of dust: unused for weeks. He said, ‘Where did they go?'

‘Nobody knows. That's where you can help me.'

Danyl nodded. He saw where this was going. He said, ‘You want me to find out where everyone has gone. Bring them all back.'

A vertical line appeared in Ann's brow. ‘Well, not everyone. The disappearance of the council staff has been quite good for local government. The savings on salaries alone! We're hitting all of our budget benchmarks and the residents of Te Aro are happier than ever.'

‘How do you know they're happy?'

‘The volume of complaints to our website has dropped to almost nothing.'

‘Because so many of them have vanished?'

‘Possibly. But I'm just the treasurer. I have no legal responsibility for residents who disappear. I do, however, have responsibility for the council's scholarship student.' Ann opened one of the drawers in her desk and took out a folder. ‘This is who I want you to find.'

She took a photo from the folder and slid it across her desk. Danyl leaned forward to inspect it. It showed a hideous teenage boy with short spiky hair, dirty glasses, eyes that looked like raisins set into mounds of dough and a weak mouth above a cascading set of flabby chins. He stood in Te Aro Hall holding a certificate and smiling horribly at the camera.

‘The Te Aro Fellowship is awarded to one exceptional student every year,' Ann explained. ‘The winner receives a tiny amount of money, a year's residency at Te Aro Scholar's Cottage, and a fern. The winners are usually arts students but this year I convinced the council to grant the award to Sophus.' She indicated the repellent boy in this photo. ‘He's a mathematician.'

‘Really.'

Ann nodded. ‘A gifted and brilliant number theorist. I studied maths myself before I came to Te Aro, so I had a particular interest in his work. I thought I could guide him. Steer him towards the breakthrough I know he's capable of. But now he's vanished.'

‘Maybe he met a girl?' Danyl looked at the photo again. ‘Or not.'

‘No, there's no girl. He hasn't fallen in love with a person. He's fallen in love with mysticism. Everything he said before he vanished points to him being ensnared in a cult.'

Danyl frowned. ‘Why would a brilliant mathematician be attracted to a mystical cult? Isn't maths all about pure reason?'

‘It's supposed to be.' There was a bitter edge to Ann's voice. ‘But sometimes mathematicians think … impure thoughts. They ask the wrong questions. Dangerous questions.'

‘Like what?'

Ann looked around the office and pointed to a stack of paperback books on a desk. ‘Consider those books,' she said. ‘They're real objects. All of our senses interact with them. There are words printed inside them and those words describe things that we encounter in the real world. But the words themselves don't exist. They're just symbols. So the word
book
describes a book, which is real, but the word
book
has no physical reality. Do you follow me?'

‘Yes. Partly. Not really.'

‘Some mathematicians wonder whether mathematical objects are real, like the books, or symbols like the words inside the books. At first they seem like symbols. The number two is just a description of two objects, right? It's not real. You can't reach out and touch the number two. But!' She held up a cautioning finger. Danyl tipped his head sideways and squinted. ‘If we look closer, it seems as if numbers really are real. Consider the pile of books again. There are four books in it. If you wanted to you could pick them up and reorder them. How many different ways could you arrange them?'

Danyl set his jaw. He was not a naturally gifted mathematician and this upset him because he liked to think of himself as smart, and the fact that he could barely count undermined this notion. He blamed his lack of mathematical aptitude on an early childhood illness: he was off school with measles for a week and while he was away the rest of his class learned subtraction and Danyl never caught up. Now his mind went blank. He tried to think. How many ways could you order four books? Was it the square root of four? The log? What was ‘log', anyway? No, wait—wasn't it just simple multiplication? Four books, four different positions …

‘Sixteen,' he said.

Ann said, ‘Twenty-four.'

‘Twenty-four. Yes.'

‘Four possible positions for the first book times three for the second, times two for the third one for the fourth equals twenty-four.'

‘I get it, yes. I meant to say twenty-four. What does this have to do with your missing student, or Verity?'

‘I'm getting to that. If there were five books there are 120 ways to organise them. Six books, 720 ways, and so on. If you divide each of these numbers by one and add the series together it tends towards a number called the infinite sum. The first few digits of the infinite sum are 2.71828 but it goes on forever, never repeating. It's what we call an irrational transcendental number. It's closely related to pi and the square root of negative one, which are also important irrational, transcendental numbers. And it appears in physical systems. The infinite sum controls the rate of radioactive decay in atoms. People spend their entire lives studying this one number. They go mad thinking about it.'

‘Is that what happened to your student?' said Danyl. ‘He went mad thinking about a number?'

‘He didn't go mad. He asked himself the question that mathematicians aren't supposed to ask. He thought about the thing they're not supposed to think about.'

‘What's that?'

‘If numbers have no physical reality—if they're just symbols created by humans—then how could we find a number like the infinite sum embedded in the deep structure of the universe? Any other intelligent species studying radioactive decay will encounter this same irrational number. Therefore it must be real. But if this number is real, then surely all numbers are real? And if they are, where are they? How does the universe interact with them? How do our brains comprehend them?'

Danyl thought about this for a few seconds then asked, ‘What's the answer?'

‘No one knows,' Ann replied. ‘But that's not the point. Maths is supposed to be about logic. Reason. Reality and incompleteness are outside the parameters of mathematical enquiry. That's why some mathematicians turn to mysticism. They seek unorthodox paths to the truth.'

‘And you're afraid your student took one of those paths?'

‘I'm sure he did. There are things he told me just before he disappeared. And you know this valley. There are sects, cults, tribes of nudists living in yurts. Worse. Sophus and I fought the night he vanished. He claimed he'd stumbled upon something here in the valley. A path leading to a breakthrough. He mentioned someone or something called Gorgon. Tell me,' Ann whispered, ‘does that name mean anything to you?'

Gorgon? It sounded familiar. Then Danyl remembered the children's rhyme. Back when he lived with Verity, he was often woken by the sounds of children playing in his neighbour's yard. Yelling. Screaming. Singing. He wanted to complain to the council: get some local ordinance passed preventing the noise of children's games exceeding a quiet murmur, but Verity wouldn't let him. Danyl remembered well the words to all their songs, one of which went:

Be me

Seem me

Or Gorgon will see me

Hide me

Blind me

Or Gorgon will find me

He recited this for Ann and her eyes gleamed. ‘Yes,' she said, ‘yes. Sophus's disappearance and the rhyme must be connected. What do you think it means?'