Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (9 page)

A map. That's all there was inside the envelope. Just a map printed on bright blue paper. An odd map, though. Danyl turned it around, trying to figure out which was the top and the bottom. Half of it showed the valley: Aro Street, the park and other major routes and landmarks were clearly marked. The other half showed … somewhere else. A labyrinth of squares and wide roads. None of the areas on that side of the map were labelled. They weren't in the valley, Danyl knew, or any part of the Capital. Although the two regions were adjacent to each other there was only one crossover point between them. The steps in the alleyway.

According to the map there was a hallway beyond the door, and beyond the hallway a small square room, and after the room, the labyrinth: vast plazas with hundreds of paths connecting them. But Danyl couldn't get through the door. He held the map close to his face, reading the tiny words beside the steps:

The First

Sign:

You must pay

to enter the

Real City

But

Your money is worth less than

ash

The first part seemed pretty straightforward. Pay to enter the Real City. Which was, presumably, the labyrinth beyond the doorway. Easy. Danyl was a little confused about the last part, but maybe that would become clear. He tucked the map under his arm and faced the door.

How should he pay? He took the bundle of cash he stole from Eleanor out of his pocket, peeled off a ten-dollar bill, knelt down and slipped it under the base of the door. He listened. A soft scuffling sound came from the other side. There was someone there.

Danyl waited. The scuffling stopped. Then the ten-dollar bill reappeared. Whoever was behind the door had pushed it back. Why? Wasn't it enough?

Danyl looked down at the bill, confused. A wisp of smoke curled up from the crack beneath the door. Danyl blinked. A thin red line of fire crept along the note. He snatched at the money, then howled as the flames flared up and licked at his fingers. He blew on them, trying to save the ten dollars, which was enough money to live on for an entire week if he stole most of his food and found some nice doorways, but it was too late. The bill trembled in a gust of wind then dissolved into ash and drifted away, leaving only a tiny unburned corner between Danyl's thumb and forefinger.

He sucked at his scorched digits. Well, that explained the cryptic last line on the map. But it didn't help him get through the door. He spent a few minutes on his knees, whispering and pleading to the person beyond it. He didn't expect a reply, and he didn't get one.

Danyl sat at the top of the steps and tried to think.

What was going on? He'd been so busy seeking Verity and fleeing giants and finding maps that he hadn't stopped to ask that simple but important question.

People were disappearing. Ann. Her student. Joy. Steve. Verity. Some of them—maybe all of them—had gone through the door at the bottom of the steps, but to get through it you had to solve some kind of riddle. The riddle was the first sign; Joy mentioned others, one of which involved the fine structure constant of the universe. What possible explanation could there be for all of this? How could it make sense? It was hard to imagine, but Danyl was an imaginative guy. A writer. Imagination was his forte.

He stared into the sunken depths of the stairway and imagined with all his might. His thoughts drifted through empty streets and bitter memories: here was Steve's deserted house; there were Verity's unseeable photographs, her cryptic voice message, the spiral scrawled in her notebook. But his mind passed over all of these things lightly; it kept circling back to the soup kitchen, like a little dog tugging at the hem of his trousers. Here, it seemed to say. Something important happened here.

Danyl was dubious, but he gave his brain the benefit of the doubt and thought about Sufi Soup Emporium. Was it the soup cook? His cryptic aphorisms? The posters on the walls? He inspected them all for meaning and found nothing.

Although … there was something odd about the cook's behaviour. He'd been about to help Danyl, but then he glanced at the money in the tip jar and changed his mind. Why?

Danyl visualised the tip jar. It was empty except for the money he'd tossed in as a failed attempt to bribe the cook. The note had fallen against the side of the jar; the light mounted above the counter shone through the paper, casting the patterns in its design as a shadow against the back wall.

The shadow of a spiral.

He dug his hand into his pocket, pulling out the wad of cash he'd stolen from Eleanor's office. He sorted through the notes. They were all small denomination bills, but two of them looked odd. Discoloured. Inspecting them, he saw there was no value written on these bills: instead of a number, they read ‘n+1'. He held one of them up to the light. It was fake.

In the middle of the bill, in the place of a face or an animal, was a complex interlocking spiral.

He slid the spiral dollar beneath the door at the bottom of the steps. The door shuddered, then creaked and swung outward.

A long, narrow hall was lit by a flickering white light. The light emitted a low hum. The hall ended in another door. The spiral dollar had disappeared, somehow, along with whoever had taken it.

The hallway was empty except for the far door and a tiny box on the wall beside it. Danyl made his way towards them, all the while expecting the door behind him to slam shut, trapping him. But it did not do this. If Danyl wanted to, he could turn and run away. The freedom to leave unsettled him even more than the door shutting, imprisoning him, would have.

As he drew closer he saw that the next door had no handle. A tiny scrap of paper taped to the centre of the door read:

This is a sign
.

Beneath it was a numeric keypad.

Danyl already knew the code to open the door. It was the number he'd heard Joy muttering as she searched the alleyway. The secret constant, hidden in the deep structure of the universe. Before he tapped in the code, he hesitated. Was he doing the right thing? Did he want to disappear? Most sensible people avoided vanishing. But maybe it wouldn't be too bad? Maybe it was the best thing for him?

But when he reached out to tap in the code, his brain gave him a tiny little zap, like a warning. He started, afraid, but then he grew angry. What was he? A dog for his brain to shock whenever it disapproved of him? No, Danyl was a human. A man. A writer. He would go where he wanted, despite what his brain thought or did. He clenched his teeth and punched in the code: 1, 3, 7—the dimensionless number at the heart of existence, and a bell chimed somewhere in the distance. The light overheard went out and the door at the end of the hall slammed shut; the door ahead of him opened.

A squat male figure stood in the doorway; he stood aside and gestured for Danyl to enter the room beyond him. As he turned, his face met the light, revealing youthful pallid features ravaged by acne. It was Ann's missing student, Sophus the mathematician.

‘Greetings, pilgrim,' Sophus said, bowing slightly.

‘Hey, kid.' Danyl stepped past Sophus and looked around.

According to the blue envelope, the door at the end of the hall led to a vast labyrinth. The room Danyl found himself in was roughly double the size of a tennis court, but there were no other exits. Three of the walls were lined with empty bookshelves, with the slats of additional disassembled shelves leaning against them. The fourth wall was covered by a dirt-coloured curtain. There was a table beside the curtain and a second man stood at it. He had his back to Danyl. Open on the table before him was a plastic suitcase. Danyl couldn't see what was inside it.

The room was illuminated by candles. They were spaced along the shelves at irregular intervals. They lit up a dozen thin foam mattresses arranged in a grid in the centre of the room. Two of the mattresses were occupied—the first by a man dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, the second by a thickly bearded man wearing a red velvet dress. Both of them wore blindfolds. Both of their mouths were stained an odd blue colour. Neither of them moved. Danyl remembered the children's rhyme.
Hide me, blind me, or Gorgon will find me
.

‘They have already made the crossing,' Sophus said in a low voice at Danyl's shoulder. ‘You have many questions. We are here to answer them.'

And then the man at the far table turned. Danyl felt a shock of recognition. It was the goat-faced man he had met at the Free Market all those months ago and nearly fought with over a second-hand book. The goat-faced man was holding a syringe. Inside it was a bright blue liquid that seemed to glow. Its radiance pierced the gloom of the basement. It was a piece of sky inside a tiny tube.

‘Don't worry,' Sophus said, his voice low, reassuring. ‘There's no needle. We just squirt the correct dose into your mouth. Then you'll make the crossing to the Real City. This way, pilgrim.' Sophus tugged on Danyl's elbow, pulling him towards the mattresses. Danyl let himself be led.

What should he do? Why was the goat-faced man from the fair here? Why was Ann's student here? Where was the labyrinth? What was the Real City? Were they the same thing? And if Verity had come here but there wasn't any exit from this room, where had she gone?

The Goatman drew nigh with his syringe of glowing blue liquid. Danyl's brain gave him gentle, insistent shocks, warning him that he was in danger.
I know, dammit
, he thought back at it.

‘Here's your blindfold,' Sophus said, applying a gentle pressure to Danyl's shoulder. ‘It will keep you safe.'

Danyl either needed to push Sophus away and run for the door, hoping to escape, or to yield: let the goat-faced man squirt glowing liquid into his mouth and hope that everything worked out. But he couldn't decide; he couldn't think through the buzzing in his head, so he chose the last by default and let himself be guided down to a mattress.

‘The first crossing is the hardest,' Sophus said, unfolding the blindfold, ‘but also the most rewarding.'

Something in Danyl's mind clicked. He understood. He knew why the map leading to this room appeared in mysterious blue envelopes, and why the entrance was guarded by riddles and codes and mysterious spiral dollars. It was all artifice. A fake mystery. A lure; a trap to draw people here. But a lure by whom? Why? ‘Stop!' Danyl batted Sophus's hand away. ‘I need to think.'

‘You can think in the Real City,' Sophus replied, and his voice was still soft, but with a hint of steel in it. ‘You'll have all the answers there, all the time in the world.' Danyl tried to stand, but Sophus pressed down on his shoulder. Danyl braced himself. And then a buzzer sounded. The door to the hall swung open.

Everyone froze. Danyl on his knees; Sophus looming above; the Goatman with his glowing syringe. They all watched as a massive shadow filled the doorway. The shadow stooped to enter the room and boomed, ‘I'm looking for my girlfriend?'

Danyl stared in horror. The giant wore huge blue jeans, a navy wool duffel coat and black leather boots with blood-red stitching. Its eyes were swimming behind thick, gold-rimmed glasses. It clutched a blue envelope in its massive hand. The giant must have seen the clues Joy left on her kitchen table. It had gone in search of her and found one of the blue envelopes, somehow, and now here it was, seeking answers.

‘Your girlfriend. Yes.' Sophus released his grip on Danyl's shoulder and hurried across the room to meet the giant. ‘I think I know who you mean. A very pretty girl. She is in here,' Sophus assured the giant. ‘With us.'

‘Who are you?'

‘We are the Cartographers.'

‘Are you some kind of cult?'

Sophus laughed. ‘Of course not. We're scholars. Simple mapmakers.'

‘Did you guys break into my house and booby-trap my bedroom?'

‘Sir—' Sophus placed his palm on his chest, the picture of wounded pride. ‘I'm a mathematician.'

‘Did you though?'

‘No.' Sophus drew closer to the giant and whispered to him. As the giant listened, Danyl sat on his mattress, watching, reassuring himself that the giant wouldn't recognise him. It hadn't seen his face, or heard his voice. It had no way of knowing that it was Danyl who booby-trapped its bedroom. Yet he had a sick certainty that he would do something stupid and reveal himself somehow. While he waited, trying not to attract the giant's attention, he gazed around the room.

He took in the two men beside him. Now that Danyl was close to them he could observe their blindfolded heads moving back and forth: tiny, jerking movements as if they were looking about for something. And he noticed something else.

The candles in the room were flickering, bowing away from the open door towards the dirty curtain on the opposite wall. And when the giant stepped into the room and closed the door, the flames danced then straightened and the curtain billowed then sagged back into place.

There was a hidden opening in that wall. A second way out of the room: a possible escape route. That must be where Verity had gone. Maybe the giant would create a distraction, somehow, and Danyl could slip away unnoticed. A perfect plan.

Then the giant said to Sophus, ‘Give your blue compound to that guy first.' He pointed a massive finger at Danyl. ‘I want to see it work.'

Sophus smiled. ‘A sound idea, friend.'

Sophus and the giant stood over Danyl. He wanted to protest, to beg for freedom, or even to turn and run towards the curtain, but he was frozen in place by his fear of the giant, too terrified even to speak. His eyes shifted towards the goat-faced man who was closing in on Danyl, his syringe dripping fragments of sky, his yellow goat-eyes gleaming.

Then Danyl's gaze shifted again: the curtain at the back of the room billowed, like a drunken ghost; then it parted and three figures wearing camouflage clothes and black masks over their faces walked through it. Only Danyl saw them. Sophus, the giant and the Goatman were all oblivious; intent on Danyl, who sat motionless with fear, watching as one of the masked figures crept up behind the Goatman and touched a small rectangular object to his back. It made a clicking noise: the Goatman bleated in surprise and pain and dropped to the ground; the air filled with the smell of ozone.

As Sophus and the giant whirled around, the Goatman's attacker brandished a taser and cried out, ‘Death to the agents of the Real City!'