Shriek: An Afterword (31 page)

My brother, however, tight-lipped and nervous {because I expected, with no truce yet spoken or implied, that you and Mary would fight the entire evening; why, the war was at times the least of my worries, even though I could sense the gray caps in the floorboards, their symbols and signs everywhere}, showed more of the strain. A silvery-purple “birthmark” writhed upon his forearm like a living tattoo. Who knew if his clothes hid some greater embarrassment? {They didn’t. I could now maintain control, at least for a while. Had I manifested in my full fungal state, it would have cleared out the opera house.}

Some of those around us had even incorporated their misfortunes into their costumes. As we walked into the antechamber, stairs on left and right leading up and down, the gold-painted walls and somber red curtains unable to hide the gouges in the floor, the gutted, silent bar awash with signs of flame, we encountered these fashion marvels. The full extent of Ambergrisian ingenuity or insanity became clear. One woman had actually created a body-length trellis over which to cultivate the deep blue fungi ravishing her, the fronds forming a full dress, complete with train. Others had fashioned earrings or other accessories from their symptoms. {It says something that we had come far enough not to be shocked by what we saw that night. How quickly people adapted to such extremes; and how, secretly, I was glad of it, for it made me normal for a time, no more or less afflicted than anyone else, especially in Mary’s eyes. Later, of course, it would help me not at all, once the “ordinary” citizens of Ambergris conveniently forgot the strangeness, the surreal quality, of the city during wartime.}

Mary gasped when she saw the woman with the trellis. Sybel and Lacond turned withering expressions of contempt toward her that she pretended not to see. Sybel had never been underground, but he had a way of adapting to each new situation as it presented itself. Lacond, meanwhile, had not gone as far belowground as Duncan, nor for as long, but he was marked for life by it, nonetheless: an encrusted blackness sometimes shone through his pores.

“You’d all better get used to it,” Lacond muttered. “There’ll be much more than that to get used to before the end.”

Sybel scowled; I knew Lacond’s pronouncements sometimes struck him as both vague and pretentious.

But you may wonder how, even with so great and ponderous a weight as James Lacond between us, Mary and I could walk so calmly into the opera house as members of the same group. The circumstances of war, as well as her keeping her distance and being eclipsed by the mushroom moon known as Lacond, didn’t hurt, but you must also remember that the two semesters of Bonmot’s ban had long since passed into history. The ban, along with much else from before the war, had become so remote that sometimes I could not find these details in my memory, or could not find them with a sharpness that made them real.

So I had, for the duration of the conflict, suspended my judgment of many things, including Mary. I had even become reconciled to the idea that Duncan and Mary might make a life together. Indeed, you might say that the war, for a time, created another kind of excitement for Duncan and Mary, an urgency to replace what they had lost now that they could no longer sneak around Blythe Academy. {Yet you were still so tense, your smile so forced, your politeness so impolite.} I did not speak to her, but we both laughed at Duncan’s jokes, and made comments to each other indirectly, through Duncan or Lacond. Sybel, for his amusement, tried to create situations in which Mary would have to talk to me, or vice versa, but was never successful.

Through the sweat-stained, boot-scuffed antechamber we walked, all of us crowded together as we climbed the stairs to the balcony, having to ignore our own sour smell.

Then, a rush of stale air in our faces, followed by another, even staler, blast, as we walked onto the balcony and beheld the opera house!

We stared down at row upon row of worn gilt seats, rapidly being filled by the people sitting in them, saw the orchestra pit filled with the febrile scratchings of musicians tuning their instruments, and beyond that, the plain wooden stage, half-hidden by burgundy curtains that had great, gaping holes in them, revealing the scurrying singers behind the veil, the grunt and nudge of set pieces moving into place.

The more we looked, the more small details came into focus, the grandeur fading upon closer inspection. Plaster cherubim placed at the corners of the balcony, framing our view, had grown old, fissures of wrinkles aging them to appear wiser, and more malevolent than innocent. Every seat had a sweat stain from years of use. Every filigree and swirl of decorative paint on the walls or ceiling had a crack, a dent, a fault line. It had always been that way, and the familiarity of it comforted me.

Then Duncan gasped.

“Look,” he said, pointing toward the ceiling. Only Lacond did not make a sound when he saw it. Even Sybel swore, under his breath.

It seems odd now that we had not seen it before all else, as if we wanted at first to deny its existence.

Looking up, as we walked forward to the edge of the balcony seats, we slowly came to recognize the source of the clear, clean, but undeniably
green
light that served as our illumination. {The rational mind can absorb only so much of the strange without damage.}

“What is it?” Mary whispered.

“The remains of a fungal bomb,” Lacond replied.

“Half-exploded,” Duncan said. “Fused to the ceiling.”

The wound we had seen from the outside of the opera house had provided scant evidence of the damage suffered by the building. The center of its mosaic dome—a stylized scene of Morrow cavalry riding to Ambergris’ defense during the Silence—had disappeared, the shards of its dissolution having simply vanished, assimilated, replaced by an intense green that shed its light in waves upon the stage. The green had eyes, or so it seemed, for it manifested itself as a series of circles or nascent fruiting bodies.

My breath caught in my throat. My neck grew sore from staring up at it. You could see through the green to the stars in the sky beyond, as if the green were no more substantial than gauze, than fog, and yet it sparkled and spun, each particle of it, as it shed the light that allowed us to see as we found our seats.

Lacond noticed that I could not look away from it, even as I sat down.

“Nothing you haven’t seen from the outside in,” he said as kindly as he could. His bulbous eyelids twitched, the cigar working up and down between his teeth, caught in his grouperlike lips. The sweet spicy smell of the cigar calmed me. “A fungal bomb that misfired, like we said. It hit the glass and stone of the dome and formed a substance…well, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. An interesting effect. And stable. It’ll stay there for a long time, or at least for the next four hours.” He laughed.

“Almost a piece of New Art all by itself,” Sybel said, grinning.

“Beautiful,” Duncan said, staring up at it. “Absolutely beautiful.”

“Horrible and shocking, I would have thought,” Mary said—a distant murmur, a whisper lost in a current of air.

“Quite a climb up there that would be,” Sybel said. “I think I could do it, though.”

“You’d climb a rainbow if you could,” I said, earning a halfhearted scowl.

I tore my gaze from the ceiling. I had to. Otherwise my thoughts would have remained up there, trapped, during the entire opera. {It stunned me to see such a thing aboveground. It reinforced a thought that had come to me more and more frequently during the war: if that which belonged belowground came aboveground, why should I remain aboveground? I was like a sailor who falls overboard and reaches for the light, only to find that the light is false, and he has descended into even greater depths.} And yet, haven’t we all seen things much stranger since the beginning of the Shift? Thinking of that ceiling now, I’m oddly unmoved. I’ve been undone by too many miraculous sights, both holy and unholy.

No one had tickets, but that didn’t mean we had good seats. Even during the war {especially during the war!}, there remained hierarchies, and hierarchies within hierarchies. Lacond could have sat in the orchestra area with one guest, but that would have meant leaving the rest of us behind. Guided to the top row, we had to lower our heads for fear of bumping them against the balcony ceiling {a comforting white, that ceiling, at least}. The seats were hard wood—hard indeed for an opera that promised six acts and only one intermission. Above us, the dome; below, the fatal curving lunge down to the ground floor seats {which, from that perspective, seemed to go on forever}, then up and through them to the orchestra pit and the stage. The balcony smelled like old rotten books. No one had cleaned it for ages. That which from afar had looked both smooth and spotless was, up close, tawdry and sad. Only Sybel, with his lithe frame, seemed comfortable.

Perhaps I remember the opera so clearly because it was the last time anyone saw so many enemies occupying the same space without trying to stick a literal or figurative knife into one another. Agents from both sides of the conflict attended the opera that night, carefully guided through separate entrances, one of which consisted of a large hole in the wall. Anyone considered neutral had been positioned in the middle section of the ground floor, farthest from the exits. {Which made me laugh—should the two sides lose composure and attack each other, the neutrals in the middle would suffer greatly for their nuanced stance.}

Imperious members of the House Hoegbotton, already resembling scions of Empire in their somewhat presumptuous frocks and pleated trousers—if made a bit cadaverous, cloth sliding off elbows, from having to ration their food—made the forced march to their seats. Fixed stares. A few nervous smiles. Many of them wore medals they had awarded to themselves for wartime bravery.

The Frankwrithe & Lewden side was entirely different. They sidled in, wore mostly black, tried to stay in the shadows—except for their leader, L. Gaudy, who entered in what I can only call a “costume” of bright red, transformed by the green glow of the fungal light to a pulsating, brackish purple. He stood for several minutes, staring over at the Hoegbotton side, hands on his hips. A wide grin had seemingly paralyzed his face. {There was some discussion as to whether this bold figure truly was L. Gaudy, or one of the many actors hired by Gaudy to portray him at official events, the real Gaudy having developed an understandable fear of assassination attempts over the past two years. Regardless of whether it was Gaudy or pseudo-Gaudy, a healthy shiver of fear fled down my spine at his appearance.}

In the neutral section, we saw Martin Lake and his lover Merrimount take their seats, surrounded by the remnants of the New Artists, all looking rather tattered and downcast. {Their day was done. No opera could resurrect them.}

Martin and Merrimount had chosen to wear half evening gown, half formal suit, and I could almost smell the aggressive cologne that had become Martin’s “signature smell,” even though his sponsorship of it gained him no monies during the war. {You make it sound like an actual ceasefire, this opera. Janice, we were all armed to the teeth, like pirates sailing down the River Moth looking for a ripe place to build a city. You couldn’t move through the hallway toward the restrooms without bumping into someone’s concealed bulge of a gun or knife, or worse. And when you did get to the men’s room, it was full of spies exchanging information.}

We took the sadly amateurish hand-printed playbills off our seats and sat, Lacond still occluding all sight of Mary on the other side. In the expectant green light, the muted chatter of people still entering the opera house, the pauses in conversation as three or four times it appeared the opera was about to begin, I had a glimpse, an echo, of my former life. For an instant, sitting there, my buttocks rapidly beginning to ache from the hard seat, I had the illusion that I had conjured up the resources, out of full-on ruin, to create an opera. For just that period between taking our seats and curtain rise, I felt powerful again. An awful feeling. I could see Edward’s slack face in the insane asylum, feel the ribbon of red rising from my wrist. I did not want that life back, not really.

Besides, the illusion was ruined anyway by a brief encounter on the way to the bathroom before the opera began. Narrowed and wrinkled by the years, Merrimount’s jester face suddenly came into view.

He nodded and said, “Did you have anything to do with this opera, Janice?”

“No,” I said. “Not me.” Caught. Accused.

“Ah, right,” he said. “I thought maybe you had.” A pause, and then, “Do you think this is what the New Art has all been leading up to? An insane opera performed during wartime?” His smile was all teeth, and then he was gone.

I hated the elation that made my face flush, brought out a little shiver of happiness. Merrimount had talked to me. {Very sad, sister.}

I told Duncan about the encounter, across Sybel’s thin chest and Lacond’s broad belly, and before he could respond, out of the darkness I heard Mary say, “If so, it’s been a waste. Everything leading up to this one performance. They should have saved it up for after the war.”

I laughed, and Sybel, like a good former manager, said to Mary, “Merrimount means that except for him, Martin, and Janice, every member of the former New Art movement of any consequence is involved in this opera. It’s the only thing they’ve been able to agree on long enough to bring to the public attention.”

Mary nodded, held her tongue. She knew Sybel didn’t like her, and she knew Sybel didn’t like her because I didn’t like her.

“Admittedly, a captive audience,” Duncan said, “with nothing else to do except hunker down in their homes.”

“True,” I said. “I suppose there is a hint of desperation in it.”

Desperation during those days could not be hidden at the opera. In such close quarters, the truth of our diets would begin to manifest as a sour smell of stale bread and vegetable broth and, oddly enough, doorknobs. Some enterprising individual had discovered that many of the doorknobs in the city had been made from sawdust and ox blood. If heated and distilled, a doorknob could be eaten, given an extremity of hunger.