Shriek: An Afterword (51 page)

Instead, in her fear and his distress, he had finally realized that he would always be alone, that he would never have the luxury of a normal life.

He winced at the look on my face.

“Janice! I didn’t think it would make everything like it was before, but I thought it would make her see that I’m not a crackpot, not a liar, not crazy. At least that…I spent a long time making those glasses for her, so she could experience it.” {Ten years. It took ten years of research to make them. But no one wanted to see through them when I was done, except you, Janice, and you already believed me.}

“Did you really think that it could end well?” I asked.

The look of grief he gave me made it hard to judge him.

“Do you know how long I’ve protected her, looked out for her?”

I began to wonder whether Duncan’s madness lay more in his inability to put Mary behind him than any of his more outlandish obsessions. {I had to try. I had to make the effort. Even if I knew how useless it was from the moment I entered the gallery.}

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s over now. I don’t think I’m long for Ambergris, at least not aboveground.”

“Going on another trip?” I asked.

“Not a trip. I wouldn’t be the first. There are others down there. In the dark, rejecting the false light, as Bonmot liked to say. It’s a choice. We all have a choice. So I think I’ll travel there again.”

“For good?” A panic threatened to overcome me, a panic that at first had no source.

“Probably. There isn’t much left aboveground for me.”

Which is when I realized, dear reader, that there wasn’t much left aboveground for me, either. What would it mean to be a tour guide for the rest of my days, fated to point out landmarks that would always be personal for me, signs of success and failure? What kind of life would that be? Would I wind up like my mother? Perhaps I would try to kill myself again at some point, when the loneliness of it got too bad. Or perhaps I would let it happen to me, go through the same routines day after day, allow myself to fall into repetitions that masked the truth. And some days wonder,
Did Duncan make it? Did he find some kind of final truth? Did he find some kind of final happiness? Could it have worked for me?

It might seem more like surrender to you, but right now it feels like defiance.

“You should join me,” Duncan said. “They’ve moved the Machine. I have to find it before they bring it aboveground. Because when they do that, they’ll be coming with it.” He gave a little laugh, almost a yelp, as if something had stung him. “So it really doesn’t matter where we are—above or below. It really doesn’t.”

“Coming aboveground?”

“The Machine is a door, Janice. But the flaw in it wasn’t about the door itself. It was the location. They have to bring it aboveground. They have to reclaim the city. To use the door, to get back to wherever they came from. I’ve studied it. I’ve gotten close to it. It could take me to a new place.”

As he had written in his journal:

“It’s great detective work on my part, Janice,” he said. “I just had to wait long enough and be patient. I just had to let the fungus eat me alive. The door is opening. The gray caps are almost ready. There will be a green light in the sky and between the towers another world will arise. Something Tonsure wrote in his journal put me onto the trail, of course—something about the fortress of Zamilon. So why not go to meet it? Why wait? No matter where it leads me.”

It was at this point, even with all that I had seen, all that I knew, that I thought for a moment that my brother
was
crazy, that Mary was right, that everything he had ever told me was a lie; that he was more insane than Lacond had ever been; that Mary had been fleeing, as she’d written to her friend, a madman; that I had been living a life fueled by reports delivered from the insane asylum of Duncan Shriek’s brain. It has certainly occurred to me that the readers of this account may have reached that conclusion many, many pages ago.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Are you
sure
?”

Duncan had been steeped in decades of alternative history, discussing his theories with the dead by way of their books, and with the living, yes, but an assortment of crackpots and eccentrics such as to make the Cult of the Lord’s Botches look positively mundane. He had developed a skin as tough as oliphaunt hide. {Yet it occurs to me now that I’ve never really wanted to be a historian, let alone a journalist. I’ve always wanted to create history, even if no one ever realizes what part of it I helped create.}

But I saw the look when I said that. The sudden, unexpected, hurt look. Was I going to second-guess him? Betray him?

“Yes, I’m sure,” he said.

“Then that’s good enough for me,” I said, and smiled.

When he rose to hug me with his fungal arms, I let him, and I hugged him back and tried not to shudder. {That moment saved me. If you had stopped believing in me too, I would have been lost.}

Then I took the glasses and left, not knowing that I’d be back soon enough.

I received one last postcard from Duncan before he disappeared. It had lodged on the doorstep, caught in a crack in the wood, as if it were an errant leaf. It read:
It’s time.
That’s all, just: “It’s time.” And it was true. Everyone we cared about was dead or lost to us. Why stay above?

Worried, I visited his apartment, where I received partial confirmation that he had left: the door stood open a crack, and inside, other than a large trunk, it was empty of anything important to him. As I walked through those bare rooms, I remembered something else I said to him, when we had finished talking about the Machine.

I told him, “No matter what you do. No matter how much you publish. No matter how much you transform yourself, you’re going to die. Aren’t you?”

He laughed, even though his eyes weren’t his, and gave me a grin that showed his teeth.

He said, and it sent a shiver through me and a calm such as I had never felt before, “There may be a way.”

Sybel and Bonmot stood there like ghosts, gazing over that empty apartment. We were all wondering what was in the trunk, I think.

There may be a way.
I’ve thought about Duncan’s words for a long time now. I have pondered what he might have been suggesting, and I think I know what he meant. I just don’t know if it could really be true. Do I believe deeply enough in everything he’s shown me?

I thought back to Duncan’s account of the Machine and the underground. To him, it was another aspect of his quest, his obsession, no matter where it led. For me, it looked like a way out, a door, as Duncan had described it, or an open window into blue sky. What had it looked like to Tonsure, I sometimes wonder.

I fell asleep for a while. I couldn’t help it. I’ve been pushing myself to the end ever faster, taking fewer breaks.

I dreamt while I slept. Edward was in my dream. Neither of us had really ever left the insane asylum. We sat there in matching straitjackets in uncomfortable chairs, facing each other. We were surrounded by huge orange-red-and-black mushrooms. The sight of their amber gills above us, slowly breathing in and out in a sussurating mimicry of conscious life, was strangely calming to me.

“Where have you gone?” I asked him.

“Underground,” he said.

“What did you find there?” I asked.

“Acceptance, everlasting life, and mushrooms,” he said, and smiled. It was a lovely smile. It radiated outward to suffuse his entire face in a golden light.

“Is that all?” I said. “Was it worth it? Did you have to give up anything?”

“My fear. My consciousness. My former life.”

“What was that like?”

“Do you remember those trust exercises they made us do? Where one of us would fall into the arms of the others, and you just had to fall and keep falling and believe that they would catch you?”

“It was like that?”

“It was like that. Except imagine falling for a hundred years before you’re caught, looking at a black sky full of cold dead stars in front of you, and the abyss at your back.” {I think you were absorbing a line or two from my journal entries in your sleep.}

“You’re dead,” I said. It wasn’t an accusation.

“Probably,” he replied.

By then, we had shed our straitjackets and we stood in the lonely dull courtyard that the asylum had swallowed whole. At the far end, twelve elegant emerald mushrooms on long stalks were being guarded by two round rolling puffballs that glistened with sticky sea-green spores in an odd approximation of the asylum’s lawn bowling facilities.

“I’m sorry,” I said, although I didn’t know what I was saying sorry for.

“It’s okay, Janice,” he said.

Then he walked away from me down the alley, getting smaller and smaller until he disappeared into the cluster of mushrooms.

Isn’t that odd?
I remember thinking in my dream. Isn’t that odd? And I don’t even know what it means.

When I woke, I thought I saw Sybel standing over me, but I was wrong. I was quite alone in my cot, in this dismal back room.

I have left out so much, and yet there is no time now to go back and put it in its proper place. I’ve had no time to explore my {brief } conversion to Truffidianism under Bonmot’s guidance after my unfortunate accident. I’ve not dwelt on my two miscarriages. Or that I was a drug addict for most of my adult life. That I loved Sirin, for many years, in secret, and that we slept together a few times four or five years ago. That—and I am so sorry for this—that I am the one who told Bonmot about Duncan’s relationship with Mary. {I suspected. At the time, I would have been beyond furious; I never would have talked to you again. But now I see that that isn’t what destroyed my relationship with her.} That I stole Duncan’s journal from his apartment months before he left for the underground, long before I acquired the trunk. {Again, I had a suspicion it was you.} That there are definitely things walking up and down the tunnel at my back. That not everything I have told you is the truth as Duncan saw it. That my typewriter glows so brightly that I no longer need a lamp to see. That Duncan’s glasses are in my shirt pocket, dormant, waiting for me to put them on.

None of that is important next to what I
do
have time to share with you, because I think I finally made Mary Sabon see—really
see.
It wasn’t Duncan. It was me who did it.

How? A stroke of good fortune, and Truff knows I deserved one. About two months before Duncan’s final disappearance, I led a group of insufferable snobs around the city—the type who sneer at anything genuine and delight in the false; the less truthful the better. Yet they turned out to be falsely snobbish themselves, once I saw them in another light—one was Martin Lake’s new agent, David Frond, and two were his friends, visiting Ambergris for the first time. It was truly a miraculous intervention. When David found out who I was, the look he gave me made it clear he had thought I was dead. The thrill rising in my chest was because he knew my name at all.

After we talked for a while, David offered me a job rounding up Lake’s old artist friends and getting them to display their work at a gallery show doubling as a party for Lake’s fiftieth birthday. With any luck, he’d let me coordinate the party as well, he said. It was certainly a better offer than anything Sirin had brought my way in quite some time.

“It will be a regular parade of ghosts from Martin’s past,” he said, smiling.

It would be a parade of ghosts from my past, too, and I wasn’t sure I liked the thought of that. Still, I needed the money if I wanted to keep my apartment. The tour guide business had been bad of late.

And, oh, the dead, the ghosts, catalogued but never accounted for among the living. The people I have known who thought they knew me. Each astonished face I tracked down vied more seriously for the winner of the most-startled-Janice-is-alive contest. Each astonished face would be a way to shore up Lake’s ego by showing what a mediocrity Insert First & Last Name had turned out to be.

Most of them were people who had been oddly absent whenever I’d been in any kind of real trouble, coincidentally enough. During the ceremonial slitting of the wrists. During the gallery’s financial woes. While I was in the hospital reconciling myself to the empty space where once five toes had cavorted like penned-up rutting pigs.

No, if it were to be a party of my peers {of veneers and sneers, more like}, then it would just be my luck that I uncovered “acquaintances” or “not quite friends” or outright enemies. Most of my lovers had vanished during the war—they’d survived
me,
but, still, somehow, the sight of bloodshed scared them—seeking out less eventful lives in Stockton, Morrow, or Nicea. Bonmot and Sybel had both died, of course, and Sirin—through his writing—had ascended to a place where he was, in a way, untouchable. Sybel, of course, was by my side throughout all of the planning for the party; how could I possibly plan a party without him?

When I think of the people I knew back then, I realize that each of us had such private, personal, and immediate experiences that discussion with anyone about them, let alone achieving some kind of joint catharsis, would be meaningless—like a Blythe Academy reunion that invited only strangers from different years. The jargon used might have some kind of similarity, but beyond that, an aching void. That had been the whole point of the New Art—pour all of that empathy into the work, leaving only the surface as a connection to other people. I wonder now if any of it was worth it to any of us.

Still, despite reservations—and, trust me, I had reservations about many of them—I managed to exhume enough of Lake’s long-dormant, sleep-tinged, hibernating friends and their dusty, packed-in-storage-for-decades artwork to earn my salary and be kept on for the party.

My main duty at the party? To herd the ruminant artists, to keep them happy. In the background, I would also help with the invitations, and in return, I would not only receive more money, but a promise of a position at a gallery—a promise I’m sure I must have known would never be kept, no matter what happened at the party. I was beyond that kind of respectability, and some part of me may even have been proud of that.

Four artists showed up for the party that night—any more and I wouldn’t have been able to handle them, or their egos. After all, I was getting close to an age when women of much greater strength than I had retired to an early dotage on some pleasure barge or houseboat sailing idyllic down the River Moth. I was also worried about my brother, and therefore not in the best of moods. I cannot say that I cared that much about party preparations or “reparations,” as I used to joke in the days before the party—with the cook, a sardonic man of my age who lifted my spirits and tried to lift my blouse on more than one occasion.

Lake had decided that the party should be held at the refurbished and renovated Hoegbotton Hotel. It had previously served as a glorified safe house, most active during Festival days, and thus had to be taken apart almost brick by brick to become a “hotel.” For example, such features as iron bars on guest room windows did not convey the right message. Nor, for that matter, did the “safety crawl spaces” that led to tunnels, that led to the River Moth. No, it had all been stripped away as if the gray caps and the Festival were now some remote happening—remote in time and space and even remotely unbelievable, from some period of ancient history that could not be verified by even the most reckless historian. A kind of silly rumor—a scary story told to children before bedtime by unenlightened parents. {I blame such innovations as the telephone. Such prosaic devices make it difficult for people to believe in the
other
until it stares them in the face and takes a swipe at them.}

To replace such outdated structures came wide staircases of marble bought from the Kalif at ridiculous prices and large glass windows that any lout with a plank of wood would find irresistible come Festival time. They had scented candles and handmade bedsheets made by the few Dogghe tribesmen who hadn’t been slaughtered by our ancestors, and chairs and tables crafted by carpenters from the Southern Isles. Every floor had its own telephone on a pedestal, conveniently located near the staircase. The smell of new stone, new furnishings, and clean sheets was so un-Ambergrisian that as soon as I stepped into the place, I knew no locals would be checking in for a night’s rest and relaxation.

The party would take up the ground floor, centered around the banquet hall, while the artists’ gathering/gallery would be located on the second floor, in a smaller room.

That night was calm but for a steady drizzle and drip of rain, the moon missing, but the street lamps making up for it. A breeze blew into the reception area. It felt cool as I waited for the Four Ghosts of Lake’s Past to arrive for the party.

I stood in the doorway, smoking a Smashing Ted’s Deluxe cigar and nursing a glass of cheap red wine from the kitchen staff ’s stock. I intended to enjoy my evening by indulging myself early on, so if things went hideously wrong, I would still have a memory to look back on with fondness.

I watched the night as it passed by me on Albumuth Boulevard, one of the last times I had a chance to just relax and observe, as it turned out. And yet, a feeling of peculiar intensity came over me. I saw it all with such precise detail, in a way that I cannot put into words. It was not that the world slowed down or that I saw anything hidden in it, although I knew there was more in front of me than I could see—I had the glasses in my pocket to remind of that. It was more that my gaze
lingered
for once. It lingered and held, as if I was parched for that little glistening of light off water in the gutter as a motored vehicle rumbled past. As if I was hungry for the exact way a street vendor cocked his head while rattling off a list of his offerings. The quiet syncopation of conversation half-heard and then gone as people walked by. The lamppost opposite the hotel, illuminating the facade of a closed bank door. The quick-low cry of a nighthawk circling somewhere above. The feel of the street through my shoes. The grit of the doorway against my shoulder as I leaned on it. The bliss of the cigar’s trembling surge of flavor, the biting smoothness of the wine.

I think I already knew then that I was not long for such sights.