Read Shriek: An Afterword Online
Authors: Jeff VanderMeer
Shriek: An Afterword (6 page)
Duncan’s remark made me laugh, and the task at hand no longer seemed so strange. I was just helping clean up Duncan after another BDD exploration mishap, while Duncan looked on half in relief, half in dismay, as the badges of his newly gained experience fell away, revealed as transitory. {I was losing sensation with each new layer peeled off—reduced to relying on old senses. I knew it had to be done, but I felt as if I were going blind, becoming deaf, losing my sense of smell.}
Me, I felt as if I were destroying a vast city, a community of souls. On one level, I lived with the vague sense of guilt every Ambergrisian feels who can trace their family’s history back to the founding of the city. Even for me, even come late to Ambergris, a mushroom signifies the genocide practiced by our forefathers against the gray caps, but also the Silence and our own corresponding loss. Can anyone not from Ambergris, not living here, understand the fear, loss, guilt, each of us feels when we eradicate mushrooms from the outside of our apartments, houses, public buildings?
The exact amount of each emotion in the pressure of my finger and thumb as I pulled them from their suction cup grip on Duncan’s skin.
It took five hours, until my fingertips were red and my back ached. Duncan looked not only exhausted but diminished by the ordeal. We had moved back into the living room, and there we sat, surrounded by the remains of a thousand mushrooms. It could have been a typical family scene—the aftermath of a haircut—except that Duncan had left behind something more profound than his hair. Already the red brightness had begun to fade from his eyes, his hands less rubbery, the half-moons of his fingernails light purple.
I had opened a window to get the smell of mushrooms out and now, by the wet, glistening outdoor lamps, I could see the beginning of a vast, almost invisible spore migration from the broken remains at our feet, from the burgundy bell-shaped fungi, from the inverted wineglasses, from the yellow-green nodules. Like ghosts, like spirits, a million tiny bodies in a thousand intricate shapes, like terrestrial jellyfish—oh what am I trying to say so badly except that they were gorgeous, as they fled out the window to be taken by the wind. In the faint light. Soundlessly. Like souls.
In that moment, almost in tears from the combination of beauty, exhaustion, and fear of the unknown, I think I caught a glimpse of what Duncan saw; of what had created the ecstasy I had seen in him when he had stumbled into my apartment five hours before. A hundred, a thousand years before. {I tried so hard to capture this for Mary, and yet I couldn’t make her see it. Maybe
that
is where the failure occurred, and maybe it is
my
failure. Not all experiences are universal, even if you’re in the same room when something miraculous occurs. I suppose it was too much to ask that she take it on faith?}
“Look,” I said, pointing to the spores.
“I know,” my brother said. “I know, Janice.”
Such regret in that voice, mixed with a last, lingering joy.
“I’m less than I was, but I’ve captured it all here.” He tapped his head, which still bore the scars of its invaders in the vague echo of color, in the scrubbed redness of it. “The spores are part of the record. They will float back to where I’ve been, navigating by wind and rain and by ways we cannot imagine, and they will report to the gray caps. Who I was. Where I was. What I did. It will make it all the more dangerous next time.”
I sat upright in my chair. Next time? He stood there, across the room from me, dressed in the rags of his picked-apart clothes, surrounded by the wreckage of fungal life, and he might as well have been halfway across the city. I didn’t understand him. I probably never would. {I didn’t need you to understand what I myself saw but dimly. I wanted you to
see
—and you saw more than most, even then. Mary saw it all, by the end, and she stitched her eyes shut, stopped up her ears, taped her mouth.}
“Yes, well, Duncan, it’s been a long night,” I started to say, but then his eyes rolled up in their sockets and he fell to the soft floor, dead asleep. I had to drag him to the couch.
There he remained for two days. I took time off from my job at an art gallery to watch over him. I went out only for food and to buy him new clothes. He slept peacefully, except for five or six times when he slipped into a nightmare that made him twitch, convulse, cry out in a strange language that sounded like birdsong. I remember staring down at his pale face and thinking that he resembled in texture and in color nothing more or less than a mushroom.
Duncan had no believable explanation for his enfeebled state when he finally awoke on the third morning. As I fed him toast and marmalade at the kitchen table, I tried to get some sense of what he might have endured in the six months since I had last seen him. Although I had swept away the remains of the mushrooms, their presence haunted us.
Elusiveness, vagueness, as if a counterpoint to the terrible precision of his writing, had apparently become Duncan’s watchwords. I had never known him to be talkative, but after that morning, his terseness began to take on the inventiveness of an art form. I had to pull information out of him. {I was trying to protect you. Clearly, you still don’t believe that, but I will give you this: you’re right that I should have found a way to tell you.}
“Where have you been?” I asked him.
He shrugged, pulled the blanket closer around him. “Here and there. Mostly
there,
” and he giggled, only trailing off when he realized he had lapsed into hysteria.
“Was it because of the Truffidian ban?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, no, no. That silliness?” He raised his head to stare at me. His gaze was dark and humorless. “No. Not because of the ban. They never published my picture in the newspapers and broadsheets. No Truffidian outside of Morrow knows what I look like. No, not the ban. I was doing research for my next few books.” He rolled his eyes. “This will probably all go to waste.”
“Did you only go out at night?” I asked. “You’re as pale as I’ve ever seen you.”
He would not meet my gaze. He wrenched himself out of the chair and walked to the window, hands in his pockets. “It was a
kind
of night,” he said.
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
He grinned. “If you must know, I’ve been with Red Martigan and Aquelus, Manzikert and Samuel Tonsure.” A thin smile, staring out the window at some unnamable something.
A string of names almost as impenetrable as Sabon’s necklace of human beads, but I did recognize the names Manzikert I and Tonsure. I knew Duncan had continued to study Tonsure’s journal.
“I found,” Duncan said in a monotone, as if in a trance, “something in Tonsure’s journal that others did not, because they were not looking for it….”
Here I mix my memories of the conversation with a transcript of the account found in my brother’s journal, which I am lucky enough to have in a trunk by my side along with several other things of Duncan’s. {It’s something of a shock to find you rifling through my papers and notebooks. Usually, it takes a person years to develop the nerve to attempt outright theft. For a moment, I was upset, even outraged. But, really, Janice, I’d rather you quote me than paraphrase, since the meaning becomes distorted otherwise.}
I found something in Tonsure’s journal that others did not, because they were not looking for it. Everyone else—historians, scholars, amateurs—read it as a historical account, as a primary source to a time long past, or as the journal of a man passing over into madness. They wanted insight into the life of Tonsure’s captor, Manzikert I. They wanted insight into the underground land of the gray caps. But although the journal can provide that insight, it is also another thing entirely. I only noticed what was hidden because I had become so accustomed to staring for hours at the maps and diagrams on the walls of my rooms at the Institute. I fell asleep to their patterns. I dreamed about their patterns. I woke up to their patterns.
When I finally began to read Tonsure’s journal, I was alive with patterns and destinations. As I read, I began to feel restless, irritable. I began to feel that the book contained another level, another purpose. Something that I could catch only flashes of from a copy of the journal, but which might be as clear as glass or a reflecting mirror in the original.
As I reached the end of the journal—the pages and pages of Truffidian religious ritual that seem intended to cover a rising despair at being trapped belowground—I became convinced that the journal formed a puzzle, written in a kind of code, the code weakened, diluted, only hinted at, by the uniform color of the ink in the copies, the dull sterility of set type.
The mystery ate at me, even as I worked on
On the Refraction of Light in a Prison,
especially because one of the footnotes added to
The Refraction of Light in a Prison
by the editor of my edition contains a sentence I long ago memorized: “Where the eastern approaches of the Kalif’s empire fade into the mountains no man can conquer, the ruined fortress of Zamilon keeps watch over time and the stars. Within the fortress, humbled by the holes in its ancient walls, Truffidian monks guard the last true page of Tonsure’s famous journal.”
That the love of a woman might one day become as mysterious to Duncan as a ruined fortress, that he could one day find the flesh more inexplicable than stone, must have come as a shock.
After the discovery, my curiosity became unbearable. I could not fight against it. As soon as I graduated, I began to make plans to visit Zamilon. These plans, in hindsight, were pathetically incomplete and childish, but, worse, I didn’t even follow the plans when I finally made the journey.
One night, as I stared at the maps on my walls, the pressure grew too great—I leapt out of bed, put on my clothes, took my advance money from Frankwrithe & Lewden from the dresser, peeled a map of the eastern edge of the Kalif’s empire from the wall, and dashed out into the night.
Without a thought for my peace of mind, or our mother’s. Typical. How many times should we have to forgive Duncan just because he was always the eccentric genius in the family? {Surely this doesn’t reflect your feelings now, but only your emotions at the time? Not with everything you’ve seen since? I refuse to defend myself on this count, especially since we would have need to forgive you many times over in the years to come.}
The wanderings and mishaps of the next two months are too strangely humorous for me to bother relating, but suffice it to say that my map was faulty, my funds inadequate. I spent as many days earning money as traveling to my destination. I became acquainted with a dozen different forms of transportation, each with its own drawbacks: mule, mule-drawn cart, mule-powered rolling barge, leaky canoe, the rare smoke-spitting, back-farting motored vehicle, and my own two slogging feet. I starved. I almost died from lack of water. Once, when I had had the good fortune to earn some money as a scribe for an illiterate local judge, I was robbed within minutes of leaving the accursed town. I survived a mudslide and a hailstorm. My feet became thick, insensate slabs. My senses sharpened, until I could hear the stirrings of a fly on a branch a hundred feet away. In short, in every way I became more attuned to the details of my own survival.
Nor were the monks of Zamilon more understanding than the elements of nature or the vagaries of village dwellers. It took an entire week to convince the monks that the rag-clad, unshaven, stinking stranger before them was a serious scholar. I stood in front of Zamilon’s hundred-foot gates, upon the huge path cut out of the side of the mountain, the massive stone sculptures from some forgotten demonology leering at me from either side, and listened while the monks dumped down upon me, like boiling oil, the most obscure religious questions ever shouted from atop a battlement.
However, eventually they relented—whether because of my seriousness or the seriousness of my stench, which was off-putting to other pilgrims, I do not know. But when I was finally allowed to examine the page from Tonsure’s journal, all my suffering seemed distant and unimportant. It was as I had suspected: the original pages, the supposed idiosyncrasies found upon them, created a pattern intended as a map for anyone lucky enough to decipher it. I only had access to one page—and would never see the rest, imprisoned as it was by the Kalif along with the authors of
The Refraction of Light in a Prison
—but that was enough to parse a fragmented meaning of the whole.
I wrote down my findings—and, indeed, a first account of my journey—on a dozen sheets of paper, forced myself to memorize the evidence before I left Zamilon, and then burned my original scribblings. The knowledge seemed too precious and too personal to commit permanently to paper. It frightened me. With what I had learned, I could now, if I dared, if I desired, access the gray caps’ underground kingdom…and survive.
I thought about at least two things on my long journey to Ambergris from Zamilon. {I had no intention of returning to Morrow.} First, to what extent had Tonsure corrupted his own journal in order to transmit this secret code—or had he corrupted it at all? In other words, did the coherent elements of the journal accurately reflect events and Tonsure’s opinions of those events, or had he, to create a book that was also a map, sacrificed reality on the altar of symbolism?
Further, I was now convinced that Tonsure had written the entire journal
after
he followed Manzikert I belowground. He had encrypted it in the hope that even if he never made it back to the surface, the gray caps might preserve the journal, not realizing it posed a threat to their secrets. This revelation, if supportable, would change the entire nature of discourse surrounding the journal, render obsolete a hundred scholarly essays, and not a few whole books besides. The battered journal returned to the surface by the gray caps had not been the half-coherent ramblings of a mind slowly going insane, but a calculated risk taken by a man all too aware of his predicament.
What followed from this conclusion is simply this: Another, earlier version of the journal must have, at one point, existed, whether a polished product or a loose collection of notes. And from this earlier version, Tonsure had created a facsimile that contained the map, the schematic, for navigation of the gray caps’ underground strongholds. Something even the gray caps had not been able to decipher. Something that would be Tonsure’s secret and his alone.
Second, and most important, my head was filled with the grandeur of Tonsure’s design, the genius of it, which I had seen but a fragment of and which our father had glimpsed only in the potential for research revealed by the letter that had killed him.
When I finally made my way back to Ambergris and strode down Albumuth Boulevard, I had only one thought. It ran through my mind over and over, like a challenge, like a curse: Did I have the courage to act on what Tonsure had given me? Could I live with
not
acting on that knowledge?
I found out that my courage outweighed my fear. Perhaps because I could not let Tonsure’s supreme act of communication go to waste. The thought of him reaching out from beyond his own death only to be thwarted by my cowardice…it was too much to bear. More’s the pity.
So I found my way down among them and back again without being disfigured or murdered. It was easy in a way. With Tonsure as my guide, I could not miss this sign here, that symbol there, until even the vaguest scratch in muddied rock, the slightest change in temperature or fruiting bodies alerted me to the next section of the path. It was a strange, dark place, and I was afraid, but I was not alone. I had Tonsure with me.
Do I understand most of what I saw down there? No. Does the memory of seeing things I do not understand help me, do me any good at all? No. For one thing, who would believe me? They would say I am having visions. I’m not sure I believe it all myself. Thus, I have become no better off than Samuel Tonsure, except that I may move above- and belowground at will.
