Shriek: An Afterword (52 page)

The four artists arrived on time—two by an old-fashioned carriage, another by hired motored vehicle, a fourth on foot. Sonter, Kinsky, Raffe, and Constance were their names: a motley rabble of ragtag talent, and none of them had ever so much as scaled a small mountain of acclaim except through the long-ago benevolent influence of Lake’s hand upon them.

Sonter looked ancient and creaky, like a narrow, withered boat with bad caulking—on the verge of a watery death, perhaps. A decade spent on an island in the middle of the River Moth had done him no favors. Kinsky had become broad and looked defeated but brave, the gray circles under his eyes negated by an animation lacking from the others. Constance maintained a look of perpetual outrage that made me roll my eyes before I could help myself. Only Raffe, though aging—and, I realized with a shock, probably my own age—appeared in any way serene or accepting of Fate.

I greeted them. They were polite. That was all I expected from them.

Raffe said to me, “You look tired. Can we help with anything?”

Which comment, for some reason, made me want to cry.

I took them upstairs to the temporary gallery—a room converted from its original function as a bar. The lighting was all wrong and I hadn’t been able to hang the paintings the way I would have liked due to an incompetent helper, but at least a small throng had gathered there already. I don’t remember my welcoming speech, I just know that, for a moment, an emotion welled up in my throat that came close to affection for those I was introducing. After all, they were survivors just like me. They were also artists, and for twenty years of my life all I had done was introduce artists. Was there a sad twinge for my lost gallery? Of course, but these days there is a sad twinge about everything—to the point that I begin to wonder if it’s my heart that’s gone bad, rather than anything to do with my memories.

Besides, it can’t be avoided. Bonmot once told me, “If you don’t feel a certain sadness toward the past, then you probably don’t understand it.”

After my introduction and short speeches by the artists, the adoring if small-in-numbers public pushed forward to engage the Obscure, Sonter somehow evading the crush and coming up to me.

“I heard Mary Sabon will be here tonight,” he said. “Is that true?”

The peace I had been experiencing left me.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I didn’t see her on the guest list.”

That had been my one petty triumph—I’d managed through sleight of hand to get Mary Sabon uninvited from Lake’s party, said sleight of hand involving an unmailed invitation and a sidewalk gutter leading to the nether depths. Somewhere
down there
a gray cap might be clutching that invitation as I write this account. It might be its most treasured possession.

So I hope you will understand in advance that my later actions were spontaneous, perhaps even unplanned. I did not go to the party, as some claimed in muttering whispers afterwards, to confront Mary. I had done my best to make sure she would not be there at all. {I believe you.}

Sonter opened his mouth to question me further, but I shut it with a well-aimed appetizer delivered on raised foot, the appetizer rescued from a passing waiter’s tray with an ease I almost never experience. Sonter turned away immediately.

There may have been an expression on my face that made him turn away. It may have had nothing to do with the appetizer. I would not rule it out if I were you.

For the next two hours, I attended to the artists, explaining their paintings to those who required an explanation. It was hard work. Some of the paintings came from the kind of obscure symbolism that either baffles me or brings out my inventiveness, but the old potent phrases from the past came back to me from the void of memory soon enough.

“Vibrant use of color.”

“Brave application of the oils.”

“The composition accentuates the face, for nicely subtle symbolic effect.”

This part I enjoyed, I admit. It made me feel free. For a brief time, while pointing out the detail of a sudden azure thrush in the dull emerald undergrowth at the bottom of one of Raffe’s paintings, I could pretend Lake was still my client, that my gallery still served as the nexus of the New Art. I even caught the eye of a former lover from across the room, and he smiled. You could say I was happy.

Then they pressed me into duty helping downstairs, in the banquet hall. David Frond’s idea of a menu included lark’s tongues and frog’s legs, fish eggs and lemon pie, squid soup and oliphaunt kidneys. It was quite an ambitious spread, worthy of the obese gastronome Manzikert III himself. It wasn’t hard to imagine another time, another place, in which this would have been a party for Duncan, had luck been on our side. A string of alternate scenarios in which we rose to the top and stayed there, instead of being diminished by time and our own enemies. {Would it have been so much better that way, Janice?}

Ill-suited for such work, I hobbled back and forth past the extravagantly costumed guests as they cavorted across the dance floor—half hunter, half flushed rabbit—escorting notables with polite conversation about the weather—there was quite a drumming of rain outside by then—or about the history of the fluted archways in the lobby that the Hoegbottons had stolen from some ruin down south.

Some of the people I escorted, I remembered coming into my gallery as children or young adults, but none of them remembered me. Scions of Hoegbotton’s mercantile empire, officials from foreign cities, even a nervous-looking emissary from Frankwrithe & Lewden {more than likely a hostage}. I don’t know why I had to escort them, and I didn’t much care. {Lake’s agent probably feared they would get drunk and cause a scene.}

Then followed a period of rest for this old woman, where I just stood in the gallery room on the second floor and smiled at patrons of the arts as they glided by, drinks in hand. The artists had all joined the reverie on the ground floor, but I welcomed the respite by then.

The party had reached that unfamiliar point where, in contrast to past events, I stood outside of it, looking in. I was far away, and very tired, remembering with regret the cigar I had had to abandon when the artists showed up. Remembering that my brother was missing and feeling powerless to do anything about it.

There is, I have to say, a perfect anonymity at a party like that, in the role chosen for me. You can pretend by remaining silent that you are invisible and yet all-powerful. The way the conversation intermingles so that you do not hear any words, just a kind of spiraling hum, or babble, or crescendo—and you can then, if you listen hard, hear the individual words and phrases, but not in a way that makes any sense. Duncan was hundreds of feet below me by then, working his way to the heart of a mystery. I know he had to be because he was nowhere near me anymore {although closer than you think}, and it seemed to me in that moment that he really wouldn’t be coming back.

And, also, I was thinking about how you can bring the hum, the babble, the crescendo low—bring it all low with a single accusation, a shout, a scream, perhaps even, yes, a shriek.

I might have stayed in that trance forever, enjoying a measure of melancholy contentment, if I had not heard someone, probably Sonter, say, “Mary Sabon is here” as he walked by the doorway.

The party jolted into focus again.

Sabon? Here? But she hadn’t been invited….

I surveyed the thinning gallery crowd. No sign of her. So she must be downstairs. I don’t know why my first thought was to hunt her down, but I got up, pushed through a wedge of drunk people, and escaped to the top of the marble staircase.

At the bottom of the steps, surrounded by the glittering necklace of flesh that always surrounded her now, stood Mary Sabon. My attempts to keep her away had been useless. She was like an apparition to me, an apparition that had manifested itself in flesh and blood and makeup. Sabon transcended any attempt to ward her off. She had risen above that.

I had not seen her in years, except in newspaper photographs or granular dust jacket likenesses. She looked younger than she had any right to be, and there was a glow to her skin, and a sheen to her hair, as if she were feeding off of the heat and light given off by her swirling necklace of admirers. Admittedly, I almost couldn’t see her, surrounded by that necklace. But such perfect poise. Such caked-on rouge. Such hypocrisy. There she was, telling her flesh necklace a series of stories to beguile them with her charm, to make them unrealize what the war and Duncan had been warning them about for years.

I couldn’t banish her, so I decided to punish her instead. {You could have left the party. Would that have been so hard?}

I was, admittedly, a slow, deliberate stalker; anyone could have evaded me, had they been able to see me over the tall individuals who kept blocking my path. It took me ages to reach the last step, what with my cane and my wooden foot. What would I do when I reached her? What would I say? Perhaps, I thought, in a moment of panic, I should take off my foot and throw it at her and retreat to the gallery. But that was absurd, and she hadn’t seen me yet. She was too busy talking about herself.

I had reached the last step when I heard her remark about Duncan.

“Duncan Shriek? That old fake? He’s not a human being at all, but composed entirely of digressions and transgressions.”

I laughed for a moment, out of surprise more than anything, but also out of affection for my brother, because it was true—except her tone made it obvious she didn’t mean it affectionately.

Mary heard my laughter because it was out of place with the rest of it—an echo too remote from the original sound. She looked around and saw me just as I finished hobbling down the stairs, making a mockery of their convenience. I suppose if they’d had a dumbwaiter I could have winched myself down instead.

Thus I descended to the foot of the stairs. The marble shone like glass, like a mirror—my face and those of the others reflected back at me. The assembled guests slowly fell apart into their separate bead selves. Blank-eyed beads winking at me as they formed a corridor to Sabon. Smelling of too little or too much perfume, of sweat. Shedding light by embracing shadows. A series of stick-figures in a comedic play.

I walked right up to Mary. Red hair she still had in abundance, although I would not like to conjecture how she kept out the gray. She wore a dark green evening dress with brocade straps. Her gaze was contemptuous, perhaps, or merely guarded.

Ignoring my presence—something she would have done at her peril in the old days—she repeated, “Duncan is composed entirely of digressions and transgressions. Assuming he’s still alive.”

As she said this, she took a step forward and turned and looked right at me. We stood only a foot or two apart.

I stared at her for a moment. I let her receive the full venom of my stare. Then I hobbled forward and I slapped her hard across the face. She grunted in surprise, seemed stunned more than hurt.

She wasn’t that much taller than me, really. Not as tall as she’d seemed while I was coming down the stairs. And not as young as she had seemed, either. My hand came away covered in makeup.

The imprint shone as red as her hair, as flushed as the gasp from the necklace of flesh. It lit up her face in a way that made her look honest again. It spread across her cheek, down her neck, swirled between the tops of her breasts, and disappeared beneath her gown. If the world is a just place, that mark will never leave her skin, but remain as a pulsing reminder that, at some point in the past, she hurt someone so badly that she wound up hurting herself as well.

“Once upon a time,” I said, “no one knew your name. Someday no one will again.”

The wide O of the mouth, the speechless surprise, the backward step, the hand raised toward her cheek, the fear in her eyes as if she saw herself already as dust. That slap would tease a thousand tongues in a dozen cafés that week, until even the swift-darting swallows that so love our city repeated it in their incessant, insect-seducing song.

To her credit, she waved back the guards. She waved back the onrush of beads from her flesh necklace. They retreated, gleaming and muttering.

“What is it you really want, Janice?” she said, smiling through her pain. “Would you like the past back? Would you like to be successful again? Would you prefer you weren’t a washed-up has-been with so few prospects you had to agree to assist to help out with a party for an artist you used to agent?”

But I had nothing to say to her.

Instead, I turned to look at the assembled fawners and sycophants, the neophytes and the desperate, to make sure they were watching. Then I took the glasses from my pocket—and flung them at Mary’s face. I didn’t know I was going to do it until the instant it happened, and then it was too late to un-wish it.

In midair, the glasses opened up and, like some aerial acrobat of a spider, attached themselves perfectly to her face, the arms sliding into position around her ears, the bridge settling on her nose.

Mary was staring at me as the scales of the lenses filled with that amazing blackness—and she began to scream as soon as the top half of her pupils disappeared, a scream that grew deeper and more desperate as it continued, and continued. It was as if she had forgotten she could close her eyes. All she had to do was close her eyes, and, after a time, I began to hope she
would
close her eyes.