Shriek: An Afterword (48 page)

And still, even as he seemed to make little progress regarding his theories, Duncan was changing, becoming other, the process always ongoing. He never recovered fully from Sabon {or AFTOIS, for that matter}, rarely expressed interest in other women, never took enough of a break from his work to notice them, really. Sometimes, Duncan later confessed to me, he would still haunt Sabon from the shadows outside her current house, or her current lover’s house. {I went a little crazy at times. Late in the game, I set traps for Mary in the AFTOIS newsletter, using Lacond’s name for crazy theories that I thought she would be forced to refute, wasting her energy and, at the same time, unknowingly engaging me in a kind of dialogue. It never happened, to my knowledge.} Between his obsession and my tour guide job, we were a veritable team of stalkers, me during the day, him at night. {The only thing that comforted me: she never married. Surely that meant something?}

Somewhere along the way—I don’t know exactly when—we grew old, Duncan and I. Old and yet defiant; if not wise, then wizened, at least. Exactly as we had always been, only more so.
No one makes it out.

Even as we stayed the same, the city changed again and again, as it always would, its grime-smeared head, its soiled towers, its debauched calls to prayer the same, and yet always it changed. I grew to love and appreciate it more than I ever had before. It was all I knew, and I knew it almost too well by now. {Yet neither of us ever found out if it loved us back.}

Then, some four or five years ago, the Shift began to affect Ambergris, disrupting the flux and flow of the city. All became unpredictable, save for one constant: as once it had become colder, now the city seethed with heat, even in the winter and spring. With this heat has come the rain, sliding down in oily sheets, or mumbling to itself in little gusts and flurries, or dissipating into a fine gray mist.

In a
Broadsheet
article Duncan cut out and stuck into his journal, the strangeness of the rain is remarked upon in detail:

Even House Hoegbotton, in the past three years, has looked askance at the weather, seemed oddly humbled by an enemy it can neither predict nor defeat.

With the heat and rain have come the agents of House Frankwrithe & Lewden once again, infiltrating Ambergris, although this time with no discernible gray cap support. And yet, with murder on the rise and rumors of war constant now, our nerves have once again become as frayed as they were on the eve of conflict so many years ago.

None of this has helped the tourist trade. The number of people attending my increasingly rote tours has dropped off. Incidents such as having to walk around a three-foot crimson mushroom suddenly erupting from the pavement near their feet, or ducking a torrent of tiny silver fish delivered by a thunderstorm, has positive novelty value to only a select few.

I know that even these simple statements of fact about the Shift will outrage some readers, most of them Nativists. To them, there has been no Shift. To them, the continued “strange-ification of the city,” as Duncan once put it, has no pattern to it, no rhythm or cause. Some still deny anything odd is happening at all, pitiable fools. I suppose, in our usual way, even those amongst us who admit to the Shift have begun to become accustomed to it. {We shouldn’t become accustomed to anything anymore. We are beginning to live in our own future, and it
should
feel strange.}

Perhaps this will make it more personal, more real: at the beginning of the symptoms of the Shift, James Lacond fell ill. When I say he fell ill, I mean that his fungal disease finally overwhelmed him, as it had sometimes threatened to overwhelm Duncan. {Alas, he hadn’t traveled far enough underground, or for long enough. Which is worse than going too far. I told him more than once that he needed to experience more, to know more, inside his body, to survive it. He refused the advice.} He was forced to retire to a back room in his own offices while Duncan ran everything in his name, instead of just part of it. After a while, he couldn’t hold on any longer and almost literally faded away.

{No one knew how ill he was until after he passed away. Janice, you should have visited him toward the end. I was there every day, hunched over a chair beside his fungus-riddled bed, trying to pry an intelligible word from between the rotted teeth of the poor feeble wreck, to no avail. “Hmmmm bwatchee thoroughgard stinmarta,” he would say to me with the perfect clarity of those beyond hope. I would nod wisely and continue to work on my own diatribes against Nativism and all the other dangerously deluded theories.

{He smelled of the rum I gave him to soothe his agony. He smelled musty, like rooms not opened to the air since the Silence. It’s true I loved him dearly and I helped him as best I could, but you could never say he was a substitute for Bonmot—that would be unfair to both of them. More correctly, when I looked at him, I saw a mirror of my own future self: gray-bearded, addlepated, a half-century’s study of history dribbling out of my brain through a mum-mumbling mouth. I cannot say it comforted me much, and yet how much more tenderly I cared for him because of it!

{There might have been no coherence to his speech, but Lacond could still write at times. Once, he drew me close and showed me some words scribbled on a scrap of paper: “I am concerned that disintegration and ensuing death will blunt my ability to continue to coherently put forth my usual arguments with the customary vigor.” It made me laugh, and that made Lacond smile, as much as he was able. I nodded, to let him know I understood. When he did pass away and I assumed the editorship of the AFTOIS newsletter, it seemed natural to continue, to dig up an almost endless series of “newly discovered” papers by the old rogue, as if he still mumbled nothing-nothing-nothing in my ear.

{Early one morning, I entered Lacond’s room to find a fine misting of glistening black spores clinging to the white sheets, and no sign of a body. The sheets smelled vaguely of lime. I knew what had happened. It had taken so long to happen that I didn’t feel grief in that moment. I just felt a sense of purpose.

{I rolled up the sheets and walked with them down to the River Moth. As I walked, I scooped up black spores in my hand and let them fall. On Albumuth Boulevard. On the cobblestones of the Religious Quarter. Smeared them along the walls in the abandoned Bureaucratic Quarter. Abraded the bricks of H&S headquarters with them. Dropped them on bushes and on park benches.

{When I got to the river, I tossed the sheets into the water and watched them drift and unwind, the last spores, drunk with moisture, disappearing from sight.

{Of course, I saved a vial of the spores to spread underground. No part of Ambergris was going to get rid of James as easily in death as in life.}

Somewhere, somewhen, in the last year, my {our!} mother also died, out in her mansion by the river. Her neighbors found her sitting in a chair, staring out at the water. She looked happy, they said, but no one likes dying, so I don’t see how that could be true. She looked as if she understood everything, they said. Or, at least, understood more than I ever did, despite my restless searching.

The strange thing is, the night before she died, the telephone rang at about three in the morning. When I answered it, there was no voice on the other end. Maybe it was a wrong number. Maybe she had decided there was nothing left to say. Maybe she just wanted to hear my voice before the end. I don’t know.

This was in the spring. The trees all around her home were in bloom—white-and-pink blossoms that drooped heavily from the branches. The lawns strewn with petals. It didn’t seem like the time for a funeral. The scent of the flowers drove out the scent of death.

Duncan and I accompanied the casket back to Stockton, over the River Moth by barge, and then by mule-drawn carriage. We buried her next to our father in the old communal cemetery next to the library where our father had spent so much of his time. There weren’t many people there for the ceremony: a few relatives, the Truffidian priest, an old friend of Dad’s—an ancient fossil of a man, stooped, bent, and a little confused {throughout the ceremony, the clasps of his suspenders hung over his shoulders, where he had flung them up while using the gents’ room}—and a couple of young people whose parents had known Mom. Standing there, surrounded by tombstones and bright green grass, it didn’t quite seem real. It didn’t seem true.

We didn’t stay in Stockton long—we had no connection to it any longer. It seemed like a foreign place, somewhere we’d never visited before. {Ambergris will do that to you—it becomes so central to your life that any other place is a faint echo, a pale reflection, a cliché in search of originality.}

When we arrived back at her mansion, we realized how much of a storehouse it had become—she had so filled it up with things, made by her, bought by her, and placed by her, that it almost didn’t seem as if she had left. {And yet, as it turned out, most of it had been stored on behalf of other people, the house emptying with each new relative who stumbled inside.}

“She was always so distant,” Duncan said, as we stood in the hallway looking at all of the portraits and photographs of family members she had collected over the years. We had an entire constellation of relatives we could seek out—some we’d met at the funeral—but, really, why bother now? It was too late. We’d been taken to a foreign place, and since then all the old bonds had snapped like rotted rope. The people we’d met in Stockton were just polite faces now, and I only resented that a little bit. Part of me was relieved to excuse myself from all the work it would have taken to hold on to those relationships. Better that they remain photographs, vague smiles and handshakes and fondly remembered hugs from childhood. We had been cast adrift by father’s death, and we had taken to it, in our way.

“She was always so distant,” Duncan said again. It took me a while to hear him, in that empty and cavernous place, surrounded by the images of so many dead people. There were as many tombstones framed on the mantel in that place as puncturing the earth in the Stockton graveyard.

When I did hear him, I turned toward him with a look of irritation on my face.

“
She
wasn’t distant.
We
were distant. We were odd and surly and
distant.
We crawled through tunnels and we didn’t talk much and we were always alone in our own thoughts. Not much of a family, if you think about it. We never knew how to be there for anyone else. So
how do we know
?” I said, and by now I’d raised my voice. What did it matter in that place? It would just echo on forever, the sound captured in the swirls of the staircase, floating down into the flooded basement. “How do we know it wasn’t
us
?”

Duncan’s face scrunched up and turned red, and I could tell he was fighting off tears. It was difficult to know, though, because most of the time he couldn’t produce tears anymore—or if he did, they were purple tears, semi-solid, that hurt as they slid out of his tear ducts. It’s a measure of how accustomed I’d grown to Duncan that this didn’t seem odd to me.

“I hardly ever visited her,” he said. {I meant I hardly ever saw her. I did visit her, but I never saw her. I tunneled up through a dry corner of the basement and left her gifts from the underground—things I thought she might appreciate. I’m sure she knew they came from me.}

“She didn’t mind. She was a solitary person. That was her choice.”

Before Dad Died, she had been as sunny and well-adjusted as the rest of us. {We were never well-adjusted, Janice.} But that death had killed us all as surely as it had killed our father. How could we deny that?

Surrounded by the awful weight of Mom’s things—the rugs, the paintings, the sculptures, the books, the bric-a-brac of collecting gone wrong—it seemed all too apparent. While the river, oblivious, gurgled and chuckled to itself outside the window. {Everyone always tells you that you become more alone as you get older. People write about it in books. They shout it out on street corners. They mumble it in their sleep. But it’s always a shock when it happens to you.}