Shriek: An Afterword (7 page)

When Duncan related portions of this to me in person, he ended with the lines, “And now you will have to believe me when I say that I cannot tell you anything else, and that it will do no good to press me for information or ask more questions. This is for your own protection as much as anything else. Please trust me on this, Janice.”

Such a sense of finality informed his words that it never occurred to me to probe further. I just nodded, thinking about the mushroom spores floating out the window three nights before, from a room that now seemed so gray and empty. I was still trying to absorb that image. Unhappily, Duncan’s journal entries are no more revealing than our conversations {You didn’t think I’d leave
both
of my journals aboveground, did you?}, but at the time, I was secretly glad he didn’t tell me more—his experience was so remote from mine that the simplest word sounded as if spoken in another language.

“I’m just glad you’re safe again, and home,” I said.

“Safe?” he said with a bitter little laugh. “Safe? Look at my hands.” He held them out for my inspection. The half-moons of his fingernails shone a faint green. Along the outer edge of both hands a trail of thin, fern-like fungi followed a rough line down to the wrists. Perhaps, in certain types of light, it might be mistaken for hair.

“That will go away in time,” I told him.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I think I’ve been branded. I think I will always have these marks, no matter how they manifest themselves.”

Duncan was right, although the manifestations would not always be fungal: for decades, he would carry everywhere a reproduction of Tonsure’s journal, the pages more worn with each passing year, until finally I began to feel that the diary of the madman had become Duncan’s own. And he would add more marks to the book, nearly silent scars that would leave their own strange language on his skin. Unspoken. Unwritten. But there.

Until only in the dim green light of the Spore would he feel truly comfortable aboveground.

Can I start again? Will you let me start again? Do you trust me to? Perhaps not. Perhaps all I can do is
soar
over. Perhaps we’ll fly as the crow flies—on night wings, wind rattling the delicate bones of the rib cage, cold singeing feathers, gaze scouring the ground below us. The landscape will seem clear but distant, remote yet comprehensible. We will fly for ten years straight, through cold and rain and the occasional indignant sparrow certain we’ve come to raid the nest. Ten years shall we fly across before we begin our slow, circling descent to the cause of Duncan’s calamity. Those ten years brought five black books flapping their pages. Five reluctant tombstones. Five millstones round my brother’s neck. Five brilliant bursts of quicksilver communication. Five leather-clad companions for Duncan that no one can ever take away. {Five progressively grandiose statements that stick in my craw.}

We fly this way because we must fly this way. I did not see much of Duncan during those ten years. The morning after my conversation with him, he borrowed money from me against expected book royalties and left my apartment. He rented a small one-bedroom at the east end of Albumuth Boulevard in one of the several buildings owned by the legendary Dame Truff. Did he delight in living so close to the Religious Quarter, to know that he, the blasphemer, slept within a few blocks of the Antechamber’s quarters in the Truffidian Cathedral? I don’t know. I never asked him. {I delighted in the dual sensations of normalcy and danger, something you, Janice, always craved, but was new for me. To wake up every morning and make eggs and bacon with the full knowledge that my dull routine might be swiftly shattered by the appearance of the Antechamber’s goons.}

While Duncan published, I perished half a dozen times. I shed careers like snakeskins, molting toward a future I always insisted was the goal, not merely an inevitable destination. Painter, sculptor, teacher, gallery assistant, gallery owner, journalist, tour guide, always seeking a necklace quite as bright, quite as fake, as Mary Sabon’s. I never finished anything, from the great sprawling canvases I filled with images of a city I didn’t understand, to filling the great sprawling spaces in my gallery. I’ve never lacked energy or drive, only that fundamental secret all good art has and all bad art lacks: a healthy imagination. Which, as I look back, is intensely ironic, considering how much imagination it took to get to this moment with my sanity intact, typing up an afterword that, no matter how sincere, will no doubt be as prone to accusations of pretense and bombast as any of my prior works.

I did my best to keep in contact with Duncan, although without much enthusiasm or vigor. The long trek to his loft apartment from mine often ended in disappointment; he was rarely home. Sometimes, curious, I would sneak up to the door and listen carefully before knocking; I would look through the keyhole, but it revealed only darkness.

My reward for spying usually took the form of a rather echoing silence. But more than once I imagined I heard someone or something scuttling across the floor, accompanied by a dull hiss and moan that made me stand up abruptly, the hairs rising on my arms. My tremulous knock upon the door in such circumstances—whether Duncan Transformed or Duncan with Familiars, I wanted no part of that sound—was usually enough to reestablish silence on the other side. And if it wasn’t, my retreat back into the street usually changed from walk to run. {I heard you sometimes, although I was usually engrossed in my work and thought it best that you not enter. Ironically enough, a couple of times, I thought you were
them,
graycapped sister.}

I imagine I looked rather pathetic in front of his apartment—this thin, small woman crouched against a splintery door, eagerly straining for any aural news of the interior. I remember the accursed doorknob well—I hit my head on it at least a dozen times.

Thwarted, I gained any news of Duncan from rare interviews in the newspapers, which usually focused on writing technique or opinions on current events. For some reason, people are under the deluded impression that a historian—blessed with hindsight—can somehow illuminate the present and the future. Duncan knew nothing about the present and the future. {I knew nothing about the present and the immediate past. I would argue, however, that I began to glean an inkling of the future.}

The biographical notes on the dust jackets of his books were no help—they crackled with a terseness akin to fear: “Duncan Shriek lives in Ambergris. He is working on another book.” Even by investigating the spaces between the words, those areas where silence might reveal a clue, could anyone ever “get to know” the author from such a truncated paragraph? More importantly, no one would ever
want
to know the author from such a paragraph.

Only in the fifth book did more information leak through, almost by accident, like a water stain on a ceiling: “Shriek intends to write a sequel to his bestselling tome,
Cinsorium.
”

By then, Duncan’s luck had run out, and all because of a single book we must circle back to, a delighted Sabon as raptor swooping down to observe over our feathered shoulder—Mary’s presence doubling, trebling, the scope of the disaster, because it was she who turned Duncan into fodder for her own…what shall we call it? Words fail/cannot express/are not nearly enough. {Triumph. Unqualified. You must give her that. Bewitching eyes and the pen of a poet.}

Gliding, wheeling, we circle back through the windstream and let the titles fall in reverse order so that we might approach the source by a series of echoes or ripples:
Vagaries of Circumstance and Fate Amongst the Clans of the Aan; Mapping the Beast: Interrogatories Between the Moth and Those Who Travel Its Waters; Stretcher Jones: Last Hope of the West; Language Barriers Between the Aan and the Saphant Empire.
And the first book, sprawling out below us in all of its baroque immensity:
Cinsorium: Dispelling the Myth of the Gray Caps.
This maddening book, composed of lies and half-truths, glitters beneath us in all of its slivers and broken pieces, baubles fit for our true crow-self.

What is it about even half of the truth that can tear at the fabric of the world? Was it fear? Guilt? The same combination of emotions that flickered through my thoughts as I extinguished the welter of mushrooms from Duncan’s poor pale body?

I don’t mean to speak in riddles. I don’t mean to fly too high above the subject, but sometimes you have no choice. Still, let me land our weary crow and just tell the story….

Perhaps Duncan should have realized what he had done after Frankwrithe & Lewden’s reaction to the manuscript. {I realized it when I read over the first draft and saw the thousand red wounds of revision marks left by my second editor—lacerations explaining in their cruel tongue that this book would either behave itself or not be a book at all.}

A month after submission of the book, Duncan’s editor, John Lewden, summoned Duncan to F&L’s offices in downtown Morrow. The journey from Ambergris took Duncan two grueling days upriver by barge, into the heart of what proved to be a glacial Morrow winter. Once there, Duncan found that his editor was “on vacation” and that F&L’s president, Mr. L. Gaudy, would talk to him instead.

A secretary quickly escorted Duncan into Gaudy’s office, and left immediately. {I remember the office quite well. It was “resplendent,” with a rosewood desk, a dozen portraits of famous F&L authors, and an angry, spitting fireplace in the corner opposite the desk.}

Gaudy, according to Duncan’s journal, was “a bearded man of indeterminate age, his gaunt flesh wrapped across sharp cheekbones.” He sat behind his desk, staring at the room’s fireplace. {His eyes were like blue ice, and in his presence I smelled a certain cloying mustiness, as if he spent most of his time underground, or surrounded by hundred-year-old books.}

Duncan moved to sit, but Gaudy raised one hand, palm out, in abeyance. The calm behind the gesture, almost trancelike, made Duncan reluctant to disobey the man, but “also irritated me intensely; I had the feeling he knew something I did not, something I wanted to know.”

They remained in those positions, respectively sitting and standing, for over five minutes. Duncan somehow sensed that just as he should not sit down, he also should not speak. “I began to think this man held some power over me, and it was only later that I realized something in his eyes reminded me of Dad.”

When Gaudy finally lifted his bespectacled face to stare at Duncan, the flames reflected in the glass, Duncan saw an expression of absolute peace on the man’s face. Relieved, he again moved to sit down, only to again be told, through a gesture, to remain standing.

Duncan began to wonder if his publisher had gone insane. “At the very least, I wondered if he had mistaken me for someone else.”

As the fire behind them began to die, Gaudy smiled and broke the silence. He spoke in a “perfectly calm voice, level and smooth. He stared at the fireplace as he spoke, and steepled his fingers, elbows on the desk. He appeared not to draw a single extra breath.”

He said:

“You need not sit and thus defile my perfectly good chair because it will take no time at all to say what needs to be said to you. Once I have said what I am going to say to you, I would like you to leave immediately and never return. You are no longer welcome here and never will be welcome again. Your manuscript has performed the useful function of warming us, a function a thousand times more beneficial than anything it might have hoped to accomplish as a series of letters strung together into words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The fire has purified it, in much the same manner as I would like at this moment—and will desire at all moments in the future—to purify
you,
were it not outside of the legal, if not moral, boundaries placed upon us by the law and society in general. By this time it ought to be clear to you, Mr. Shriek, that we do not intend to buy the rights to your ‘book’—and I use the word ‘book’ in its loosest possible sense—nor to its ashes, although I would sooner buy the rights to its ashes than to its unblemished pages. However, on the off chance that you still do not comprehend what I am saying to you, and allowing for the possibility that you may have entered a state of shock, I shall continue to talk until you leave this room, which happy event I hope will take place before very much longer, as the sight of you makes me ill. Mr. Shriek, as you must be aware, Frankwrithe & Lewden has a history that goes back more than five hundred years, and in that time we have published our share of controversial books. Your first book—which, by the way, you may be fascinated to know is as of this moment out of print—was the forty-first book to be banned by the various Antechambers of Ambergris over the years. We certainly have no qualms in that regard. Nor have we neglected to publish books on the most arcane and obscure topics dreamt of by the human brain. As you are no doubt aware, despite the fact that many titles no longer have even a nostalgic relevance, we keep our entire, and considerable, backlist in print—
Pelagic Snail Rituals of the Lower Archipelago
comes to mind, there being no such snail still extant, nor such an archipelago; still, we keep it in print—but we will make an exception for your first book, which shall be banished from all of our catalogues as well. As I would have hoped you had guessed by now, although you have not yet left this office never to return, we do not like your new book very much. In fact, to say I do not like your book would be like calling a mighty tree a seedling. I loathe your book, Mr. Shriek, and yet the word ‘loathe’ cannot convey in even a thousandth part the full depths of my hatred for this book, and by extension, you. But perhaps I should be more specific. Maybe specifics will allow you to overcome this current, potentially fatal, inertia—tied no doubt to the aforementioned shock—that stops you from leaving this office. Look—the last scrap of your manuscript has become a flake of ash floating above the fireplace. What a shame. Perhaps you would like an urn to collect the ashes of your dead newborn? Well, you can’t have one, because not only do we not have an urn, but even if we did, we would not allow you to use it for the transport of the ashes, if only from the fear that you might find some way to reconstruct the book from them—and yes, we do know it is likely you have a copy of the manuscript, but we will feel a certain warmth in our hearts if by burning this copy we can at least slow down your reckless and obstinate attempt to publish this cretinous piece of excrement. Returning to the specifics of our argument against this document: your insipid stupidity is evident from the first word of the first sentence of the first paragraph of your acknowledgments page, ‘The,’ and from there the sense of simple-minded, pitiable absence of thought pervades all of the first paragraph until, by the roaring crescendo of imbecility leading up to the last word of the first paragraph, ‘again,’ any possible authority the reader might have granted the author has been completely undermined by your inability to in any way convey even an unoriginal thought. And yet in comparison to the dull-witted pedantry of the second paragraph, the first paragraph positively shines with genius and degenerate brilliance. Perhaps at this point in our little chat, I should repeat that I don’t very much like this book.”