Shriek: An Afterword (8 page)

Gaudy then rose and shouted, “YOU HAVE BEEN MEDDLING IN THINGS YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT! DO YOU THINK YOU CAN POKE AROUND
DOWN THERE
TO YOUR HEART’S CONTENT AND NOT SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES?! YOU ARE A COMPLETE AND UTTER MORON! IF YOU EVER COME BACK TO MORROW, I’LL HAVE YOU GUTTED AND YOUR ORGANS THROWN TO THE DOGS! DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND. ME??!”

What other rhetorical gems might have escaped Gaudy’s lips, we will never know, for Duncan chose that moment to overcome his inertia and leave Frankwrithe & Lewden’s offices—forever.

“It’s not so much that he frightened me,” Duncan told me later. “Because after going belowground, really, what could scare me? It was the monotone of his delivery until that last spit-tinged frothing.” {I was terrified, Janice. This man was the head of an institution that had been extant more than five hundred years ago. And he was telling me my work was worthless! It took a month before I even had the nerve to leave my apartment in Ambergris. I rarely visited Morrow again, and kept a low profile whenever I did.}

Later, during the War of the Houses {as it came to be called}, we realized that Gaudy, for political reasons, could hardly have reacted any other way to Duncan’s manuscript. But how could Duncan know that at the time? He must have been shaken, at least a little bit. {Yes. A bit.}

Undaunted, Duncan found a new publisher within six months of Gaudy’s strange rejection. Hoegbotton Publishing, a newly created and over-eager division of the Hoegbotton & Sons trading empire, gave Duncan a contract. In every way, the book struck Duncan’s new editor, Samuel Hoegbotton—an overbearing and inconsequential young man with hulking shoulders, a voice like a cacophony of monkeys, and severe bad breath {who would never find favor in the eyes of his tyrannical father, Henry Hoegbotton}—as “A WORK OF GENIUS!” Duncan was happy to agree, bewildered as he might have been, unaware at the time that Samuel had transferred from the Hoegbotton Marketing Division. Samuel had not set foot in a bookstore since his twelfth birthday, when his mother had presented him with a gift certificate to the Borges Bookstore. {“Promptly traded in for its monetary value,” Sirin, our subsequent editor, mused disbelievingly some years later.} That Samuel died of a heart attack soon after publishing Duncan’s fifth book surprised no one. {Except me!}

The book, published with the full {perhaps crushing} weight of the Hoegbotton empire behind it, was called
Cinsorium: Dispelling the Myth of the Gray Caps.
It became an instant bestseller.

Despite this success,
Cinsorium
signaled the beginning of Duncan’s slide into the obscurity I had previously wished upon him. If he had dreamt of a career as a serious historian—the sort of career our father would have died for—he should have suppressed the book and moved on to a new project. Samuel Hoegbotton, contributing to the disaster, ordered the printing of a banner across the top of the book {almost, but not quite, obscuring my name} that proclaimed: “At Last! The Truth! About the Gray Caps! All Secrets! Revealed!”

I bought the book as soon as it came out, not trusting Duncan to send me a copy. {I would have, if you’d asked.} It disappointed me for contradictory reasons: because it showed little of the scholarly care displayed by
On the Refraction of Light in a Prison,
and because it never mentioned, even once, Duncan’s underground journey. I had already accepted the irritation of waiting to read about the trip along with everyone else. This I could have tolerated, even though it indicated a lack of trust. But not to mention it at all? It was too much. {I did mention Zamilon, though. Wasn’t that enough? To start with?}

The book did not “reveal” all secrets. It obscured them. Duncan tantalized readers with incredible images he claimed had come from ancient books, the existence of which most scholars discounted. Mile-high caverns. Draperies of fungi that “undulated in time to a music conveyed at too high a pitch for the human ear.” Mushrooms that bleated and whined and “talked after a fashion, in the language of spores.” {Yes, perhaps I obscured some deeper truths, but nothing was made up.}

In typical Duncanesque prose, it tried with almost superhuman effort to hide the paucity of its insight:

A beautiful sword, but blunt, the book relied on quotations from “unnamed sources” for the bulk of its more exotic findings. Although claiming to know the truth about the gray caps, Duncan instead spent most of the book combining a history of fungi with historical suppositions that made me laugh:

The book, in short, violated most rules of historical accuracy and objective evidence. Duncan mentioned that he had journeyed to examine the page of Tonsure’s journal, but he gave no specifics of location or content. Certainly nothing like the detail and “local color” provided by his own journal. {I admit
Cinsorium
was hardly my finest hour, although I had my reasons for writing it at the time. My thoughts turned to Tonsure and his encryptions. My need for encryption was not as urgent as his, or as profoundly solitary, but I still felt a certain danger. Not just from the gray caps, but from those who might read the unexpurgated truth and…reject it. And reject it violently. Couldn’t I, I reasoned—falsely—allude to and suggest that truth so that, perhaps, even if in just a thousand minds, my suspicions might harden into certainty? It is a question I wrestled with even later, working with James Lacond, although by then I had come to realize that the best I could hope for was a hardening certainty in a mere handful of souls.}

The most daring idea in
Cinsorium
was the theory that Tonsure had rewritten the journal after completing it, which alienated dozens of influential scholars {and their followers, don’t forget} who had based hundreds of books and papers on the conventionally accepted chronology. {I don’t think it alienated them—most of them lacked the resources or the knowledge to verify or deny the discovery. I didn’t feel like an outcast, at first. Besides, is it fair to chastise me for both poor scholarship and unique ideas?}

As I read, I became struck by the way that half-truths wounded Duncan’s cause more seriously than outright lies. He stumbled, he faltered throughout the book, but continued on anyway—persevering past the point where any reasonable person might have given up on such a hopeless trek.

Oddly, it made me love him for being brave, and it almost made me cry as well. I knew that he held our father in his head as he wrote, running toward him across the summer grass. That, I could respect. But by not revealing all, he became lost in the
land between,
where lies always sound like lies, and so does the truth. He could not protect the gray caps
and
satisfy serious readers without betraying both groups. {The gray caps needed no protection, only the readers. Janice, you may now be beyond protection, but there are still things that can be done for those aboveground.}

In part due to these defects,
Cinsorium
had a peculiar publication history. It became an instant bestseller when the Kalif’s Minister of Literature, rather than ban the book, had his operatives buy all available copies and ship them off to the Court. Readers in the South bought most of the second printings, the Kalif distracted by warfare with the Skamoo on his northern border. However, despite the sale of more than fifty thousand copies, Hoegbotton refused to go to a third printing.

Certainly the strange and curious silence created by the book must be seen as a reason for Hoegbotton’s reluctance to reprint
Cinsorium.
This silence occurred among those most raucous of vultures, critics. In the superheated atmosphere that is the Southern book culture, such omissions rarely occur. Even the most modest self-published pulp writer can find space in local book review columns. {Fear. It was fear.} This lack of attention proved fatal, for although many journals noted the book’s publication in passing, only two actual reviews ever appeared, both in a fringe publication edited by James Lacond. Lacond, a passing acquaintance of Duncan’s even in those days before the war, wrote that, “Subtle subjects require subtle treatments. For every two steps back, Shriek takes three steps forward, so that in the circular but progressive nature of his arguments one begins to see this pattern, but also a certain truth emerging.” Perhaps. Perhaps not. {At least someone was prepared to accept it!}

But none of these events concerned me, not in light of what I thought the book told me about Duncan. The book, I felt, was an argument between Duncan and Duncan, and not about any of the surface topics in the book. Duncan did not know what, exactly, he had seen while underground. He had only a rudimentary understanding of the gray caps. {This is true—I didn’t know what I’d seen. But I couldn’t keep what I didn’t know to myself. How could I? I saw too many things that might shake someone’s worldview.} This kept alive Duncan’s compulsion to do what I most feared: return to the underground until he felt he understood…everything.

Perhaps it should not have surprised me that Duncan’s next four books settled back into the realm of acceptable accomplishment. Duncan reverted to the scholarship that had been his trademark. It was too late, of course. It didn’t, and couldn’t, matter, because the cowardly critics who had refused to review
Cinsorium had
read it. And so Duncan’s scholarly style steadily lost readers seeking further crass sensationalism, while critics savaged later books, most of them omitting any reference to
Cinsorium.
It hung over Duncan’s work like a ghost, an echo. The reviews that did appear dismissed Duncan’s work in ways that made him appear a crank, a misfit, even a heretic. {I’ve always blamed Gaudy for this, although for a long time I had no proof, or even a coherent theory. But I now believe Gaudy used his connections to blacklist me in typical F&L fashion—with the underhanded compliment, the innuendo, the insinuation. Did Gaudy do more than meet with a few influential journal editors? Perhaps not, but that might have been enough.} They appended the story of his banning by Bonmot in harmful ways: “This, the latest offering from the author who blasphemed against the Truffidian Church, concerns…” It did not matter what it concerned.

Shortly after the publication of
Vagaries of Circumstance and Fate Amongst the Clans of the Aan,
Hoegbotton announced that Duncan had been dropped from their stable of writers. Gaudy must have been laughing from behind his rosewood desk in Morrow. No other publisher of note would prove interested in Duncan’s sixth book. None of his books would long remain in print. For all practical purposes, Duncan’s career as a writer of historical books had come to an end, along with any hopes of serious consideration as a historian. At the age of thirty-three.

It would only get worse after he met Sabon, who would spend much of her time chipping away at Duncan’s respectability, so that his books no longer contained anything but metaphorically shredded pages.

Odd. It strikes me for the first time that Duncan has been preparing me for this moment all of my life. There’s a green light shining upon the typewriter keys, and maybe it’s the light that allows me to see so clearly. Must we always be blind to those we are close to? Must we always fumble for understanding? Duncan never mistrusted me. He just didn’t want me to implode from the information he had—he wanted to dole it out in pieces, so that it would not be such a shock to my system. And yet it would have been a shock, no matter how gradual. I don’t see how it could be otherwise.