Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (21 page)

She raced to the culvert at the bottom of the hill. When she passed the last townhouse she caught a glimpse of the invader. They were a long way away and Dog's eyes weren't very good: what she saw was a blur of motion as the invader approached the gate. The invader held a cardboard box under her arm and a club in her free hand, and she tossed them over the gate before clambering over herself. The box carried the wounded male's scent. Is that why the invader had invaded? To steal the box?

Dog reached the culvert. Beyond it lay the network of tunnels which Dog Was Not Allowed Inside. But she knew the network well. She could smell the stream, teeming with its tiny sightless aquatic life. Beyond that the bookshop, with its acidic aroma of paper, ink and glue. Deeper down was the old quarry. These tunnels were all blocked off, but traces of what lay beyond filtered out through the gaps in the brickwork and wound its way to Dog's warm, damp, powerful nose, and troubled her brain with incomprehensible sensations. There was something down there, Dog knew. Something deep. Something strange. Something very, very old.

It was the Old Smell in its deepest most pure essence. But closer—much closer—was the warm mixture of the pack leader's scent. Dog sat at the mouth of the tunnel and barked. She explained what had happened and took full responsibility for the lapse in security. She explained about the sun-warmed blocks and promised not to sleep on them again. She described the invader—bipedal, female, mostly hairless—and her attack on the man in the townhouse and the theft of the box.

And the pack leader was coming! Dog leaped about for joy, jumping and barking. The pack leader! The pack leader! And then she was there! Dog forgot—for a moment—everything that had happened, and continued leaping for joy, until a scream rang out. It came from the townhouse halfway up the slope. The woman had awoken and discovered the man. The pack leader hurried towards the townhouse.

Dog led the way. By the time they arrived, the woman had emerged from the house. She had the man's blood on her, and she clutched a stick like a club and trembled with fear. She was sobbing and breathing in deep ragged gasps. When she saw the pack leader her terror deepened. She raised the stick and stepped backwards and said, in a voice drowned in fear, ‘Gorgon.'

~

The bath crashed into the edge of the doorway. The males inside it cried out, adjusted direction and tried again.

Dog watched, amused. As soon as they were inside she would follow them. If they tried to stop her or shut the door, or poke any of their limbs out from beneath the bath, Dog would grab them and pull them outdoors and run around them, barking. Fools.

They were halfway through now. Dog scratched at the bath, ready to rush inside. But what was happening? The bath rose to block the doorway. They were shutting her out! They'd tricked Dog! She threw herself against the upturned tub, but it held firm.

She would have to go get help. The pack leader's house was too far away but her servants were nearby. They would do.

She headed towards the road. Several servants were coming up the hill. They carried strange instruments, all of which reeked of the Old Smell. Dog would get them to follow her.

She was halfway to the road when something struck her flank. She snarled and spun around. A stone! Someone had hit her with a stone! Who dared?

There was a flash of movement from the side of the house. One of the enemy males: the master, the one not chained to the bathtub. It had found another exit. And now it thought it could stand there and toss stones at Dog with impunity! Her head clouded with rage. She charged at him and he fled, his stupid bald arms flying about his soft weak bald body. She rounded the corner of the house and saw him scrabbling up the concrete stacked against the wall—the same one the man and the woman once used—leading to an open window. He jumped through and Dog gave chase, racing up the steps.

But just as she reached the top a new smell reached her. There was another person in Threshold. Someone who wasn't supposed to be here. They were around the other side of the townhouse, coming up the hillside. Someone Dog had smelled before.

The invader.

Dog knew what she had to do. Leave these absurd males. Find the invader and destroy them. But it took a second for Dog's brain to process these thoughts, and while she thought she continued to run up the steps, carried on by rage and instinct. Beyond the window was a dark room with a long drop to the floor. Once inside, Dog wouldn't be able to get out. She needed to stop. Turn back!

But she was moving too fast. Dog leapt into the darkness.

Danyl ran.

The room was lit by a shaft of light from the window. He was almost at the door when the light vanished, blocked by the head and body of the shaggy wolf-sized dog he'd deliberately enraged.

It bounded into the room. The light returned, casting the dog's monstrous shadow on the wall. This shadow looked up, growled and leapt. Danyl stumbled backwards then remembered that the actual dog was behind him. He reversed direction and ran for the archway.

This was all his idea. Five minutes ago he'd been trapped beneath the bath with Steve while the dog's fanged, drooling snout pushed under the rim millimetres from his face. They were screaming at each other until Danyl clutched Steve's wrist and said, ‘We're friends, remember? We're a team. We can beat a dog.'

He'd laid out his plan. They would scuttle back to the house using the bath as protection, then use it to blockade the door. Steve would hold it in place while Danyl ran back through the house, climbed out the back window, got the dog's attention and tricked it into chasing him back inside. Danyl could then run to the front door, by which time Steve would be ready to slam it shut the instant Danyl ran through, thus trapping the dog in the building.

It was a great plan, Steve had said, nodding with approval. And yet, Danyl wondered, as he sped towards the entrance hall jumping over piles of construction debris like a nimble but terrified steeplechase pony, was any plan in which a drooling beast chased him through the darkness towards a remote exit really, truly great?

He jumped on a pile of boards, then jumped off it and sailed through the air, his legs pedalling in space. Before he landed, his brain gave him a series of gentle zaps. Danyl blinked them away, trying to concentrate. Be quiet, he thought at his brain. I'm handling this.

His brain had a point, though. Danyl was supposed to avoid stressful situations and here he was being chased by a monster through a ruined building. Maybe he'd chosen poorly. Should he have abandoned Steve after all and fled when he had the chance? No. That thought was unworthy. Steve was Danyl's friend: saving him was the right thing to do. It was nice to think he'd made one good choice in his life.

But once he'd trapped the dog and escaped from Threshold, Danyl would need to leave the valley immediately. Go back to his former tranquil life. Become Medicated Danyl again. He would never solve the mystery of the Real City, or the Spiral, or Verity's disappearance, but if the price of knowledge was being eaten by a dog, then it was a price he was not prepared to pay.

He landed with organ-bruising force. The dog was right behind him: he heard its paws scrabbling on the tiles. But he was in the entrance hall. He was going to make it. There was the door, a rectangle of sunlight. There was Steve, silhouetted. There was a shape behind him. Danyl couldn't make it out; the light was too bright. But he could see Steve's face: the smile lines around his eyes, the stubble on his head. His lips were moving. Was he saying something? Danyl couldn't hear over the tide of blood pounding in his ears.

And then the room dimmed. The light was going out. Why? A solar eclipse? No! The door was closing! Steve was shutting it, trapping Danyl in the house with the dog!

Danyl couldn't even scream. He didn't have the oxygen. He met Steve's eyes and mouthed his name, and the beam of light tightened. The shape behind Steve swam into focus like an object in a telescope.

It was Ann, the treasurer.

The light vanished and the door clicked shut.

Steve closed the door, kneeled down and leaned against it, blockading it.

The door was wood. It was warm from the sun. From the other side came footsteps. Barking. Furious screams. Behind him Ann was saying something. Steve ignored these distractions. He was trying to think. Some combination of thoughts had turned a key inside his mind and he remembered what he saw on his second journey to the Real City.

Danyl and Steve had discussed the Real City before escaping the townhouse and being attacked by the dog. What was it? What were the pathways? What was the Spiral and where did it lead? Was the Real City another reality? Or an ultimate reality? Was it, Danyl had wondered, a more real reality?

Steve insisted that there was no ultimate reality. There was no face behind the mask of appearance. It was all masks. Everything was a symbol for something else. A pointer to a pointer. But you couldn't explain that to Danyl. He refused to believe there was nothing to believe in. You couldn't make him understand that there was nothing, ultimately, to understand. Steve focused on what mattered. What happened here, in Te Aro, not some alternate or ultimate reality, or whatever the Real City was or was not.

But Gorgon cared about the Real City and Gorgon was Steve's enemy. Anything that might help defeat her: any clue, any weakness, any scrap of intelligence could be vital. Steve's subconscious had noticed something and the act of locking Danyl inside the townhouse with the savage dog had somehow unlocked the memory.

The paths in the Real City had changed.

There wasn't much to see in the City. Plazas. Pathways. Void. The Spiral. That uniformity made it difficult to map. Everywhere looked the same, and not even Steve's powerful intellect could chart it. If he'd been allowed to wake every day and document his path, then take a different one the next night, he could have done so. That's what Sophus and the rest of the Cartographers did.

Why? They wanted to reach the Spiral, obviously. But why were they keeping all those so-called pilgrims captive in the City? Why lure more prisoners into the bookshop? Why not just chart the City themselves? During his first imprisonment, Steve had observed that the number of pathways connecting to each plaza was always an even number. When he returned to the Real City today, his subconscious noticed that this had changed. Some plazas had three pathways, and some pathways led to dead ends, meaning that the plaza at the terminus had only one pathway.

Interesting, but what did it mean?

This wasn't the best time to be trying to figure that out, to be honest. Steve was deep in enemy territory, chained to a bathtub, alone, having just locked his only ally in a house with a savage dog, and with a lot of generally stressful stuff going on around him. But Steve's intellect was like a runaway train. It had momentum. He couldn't just think about something more pressing, like Danyl screaming from behind the locked door, or why Ann the treasurer was here, her hands cuffed behind her back, or even what he was going to do about the goat-faced archivist holding a syringe filled with DoorWay to Steve's throat. No, his mind bore down on the problem of the Real City.

It had changed. Why?

Was it because the number of people trapped in the City had increased? Was the act of observing the City generating a pathway through the maze? Had that been Gorgon's plan all along—to imprison enough people in the Real City to bring a route through it into being, then travel to the Spiral herself? That had to be it. It explained everything. That was the reason Gorgon was so furious at Steve. His operations struck at the heart of her scheme. That was why she'd imprisoned him in a room flooding with water. When that failed, she'd sent her top lieutenants to capture Steve and bring him before her, and that's why Steve was now kneeling beside his bathtub with Sophus on one side of him and Eleanor on the other, and the archivist behind him holding a syringe filled with DoorWay, the tip of the needle pressing against Steve's cervical artery.

However, it didn't explain the presence of the treasurer. Ann's face was smeared with mud. Her expression was one of silent fury.

Eleanor regarded them both with evident satisfaction and said, ‘Take this idiot'—she indicated Steve—‘and this treasurer'—she nodded at Ann—‘to the top of the hill. Take them before Gorgon.'

Danyl crashed into the door and bounced off it. His jaw and genitals sustained most of the impact, and he pivoted and stumbled directly towards the dog who was astonished to see the door slam shut and her target reverse direction. Her claws scrambled on the smooth tiles and her hindquarters swung as she pitched over into a controlled slide, snapping at Danyl's legs as he leapt over her in a desperate but successful star-jump.

He landed and ran towards the kitchen. When he reached the doorway he turned and screamed, ‘Steve?'

Steve did not reply. The dog clambered to its feet and snarled at Danyl.

‘Steve!'

The dog lunged. Danyl fled. He jumped onto the long bench running down the centre of the room. His plan was to sprint to the end and leap for the jagged hole in the roof then pull himself up into the bathroom and cower in terror until Steve rescued him. But the dog anticipated all of this. It ran to the end of the bench, easily outpacing Danyl, and stood on its hind legs with its front paws on the countertop, grinning at him.

Elevation. He needed elevation. Fast. He backed away from the dog while it watched him with glistening brown eyes. It thought Danyl was trapped. If he jumped off the bench it would run him down in seconds. There was nowhere else to go.

But there was. Danyl feinted to the left. The dog dropped down and ran to the left side of the counter, so Danyl jumped to the right. He splashed his way across the floor, over the half-submerged, staring bodies of the blue-lipped pilgrims, to the pile of concrete and sheets of Perspex stacked against the wall. He clambered to the top of the pile. The dog tried to jump after him but Danyl pulled a wobbly sheet of Perspex out from under him and held it up as a shield. The dog's snout collided with the sheet in a smeared tableau of fangs and nostrils and drool. It fell back and jumped up again, but Danyl's shield held firm.

The dog paced back and forth. She did not look worried. She knew Danyl was trapped on top of the pile, that he had nowhere to go. She sat, looked up at him and panted happily.

Danyl smiled back. This dog thought it was better than him, but she was probably wrong. Danyl could use reason and symbols and tools. All the dog could do was run fast and crush his bones between her jaws.

He gripped the Perspex and wobbled it. He looked at the hole in the roof, which was about three metres away. The sheet of Perspex was about three metres long.

Danyl wasn't an engineer or a materials scientist. He was just a writer trapped by a dog. But he was pretty sure there were building codes and minimum standards for construction materials such that any discarded Perspex left lying around should be able to bear the weight of an adult male crawling through mid-air above a savage animal. So he shifted his grip on the Perspex and, grunting with effort, manoeuvred the far end into place and slid it through the hole. After that it was a simple matter of inching along the sheet while it bent under Danyl's weight and the dog leapt high into the air and grabbed the hem of his trousers in her jaw and tried to drag him down. His face pressed onto the Perspex as he gripped its edges with both hands, and he saw it begin to crack; flaws were appearing millimetres away from his face and spreading out with a cascade of tiny crackling sounds, then the fabric of his trousers ripped and the dog dropped back down to the floor and uttered a frustrated, sorrowful growl as the sheet sprang up again, waves wobbling along its disintegrating length.

Danyl scuttled forward, his screams rising and falling with the undulation of the sheet, and then he was through the hole in the roof, his arms clutching the twisted beams, pulling himself up into the wet, sunlit bathroom where he lay on his back and panted in time with the dog's loud panting below and his heart thrashed in his chest like a suffocating fish.

After a while his breathing calmed and his heart slowed. He was lying on something hard and sharp that was digging into his back. He sat up and discovered he'd been lying on Steve's crowbar. They must have left it here when the bath collapsed through the floor. Finally, a lucky break.

It took a few minutes of precision jimmying and smashing to force the bathroom door open; eventually the wooden joints crackled and gave way. A block of timber was jammed between the door and the floor on the other side. Danyl forced the crowbar through the gap and poked at it. It gave, and the door opened.

The room beyond was empty except for three single mattresses on the floor. The light came in through a window in the east wall, looking out on the trees rising up the flank of the hill. A second window faced the Threshold development, but it was boarded up. There was another door in the far wall. It opened onto the landing: stairs leading down to the foyer. Danyl closed it hurriedly. He didn't know much about dogs, but he was pretty sure they could climb stairs.

As he moved towards the window, his shoes made a crackling sound, like slow tap-dancing. There was something sticky underfoot. The floor was littered with screwed-up pieces of paper and dozens of empty plastic vials, all embedded in a dry brown pool radiating from one of the mattresses, which had a dull reddish stain at one end. Danyl knelt and touched his fingertips to the floor then sniffed them. Blood.

He picked up a vial. It was the size of his little finger, empty, with a blue residue.

Three people had lain in here taking DoorWay. Travelling to the Real City. One of them had been wounded while they lay. They'd lost a lot of blood. Danyl remembered the freshly dug grave atop the plateau.

He wondered what happened to your mind if you died while you were in the Real City.

He picked up a piece of paper and unscrewed it. It shed a rain of brown flakes like insect skins, revealing a map: a scrawled diagram of the Real City. The other side of the page was covered in dense, printed text. It was hard to read through the creasing and the blood. Danyl held it up to the window and the letters swam into focus.

It was a page from his book.