Shriek: An Afterword (53 page)

She stumbled, caught herself, blinked twice, stopped screaming—but, no: she was still screaming, it was just soundless. A look had come over her that destroyed the unity between mouth, eyes, forehead, cheekbones. Before me, she became undone looking through those glasses.

She fell to her knees, now grappling with the glasses, but they did not want to come off. Her precious flesh necklace didn’t know what to do—it dithered, came forward, retreated, unable to reconcile this moment of Sabon’s life with the last.

Raffe and Sonter were the first to recover from their shock, pushing through the crowd to come to Mary’s aid. Sabon was slack-jawed, moaning, and saying a word over and over again. It sounded suspiciously like “No.” Sonter tried to pry the glasses off while Raffe comforted Mary. But they still wouldn’t come off.

Finally, mercy flooding back into me, I stepped forward and plucked the glasses off from her face; they scurried across the floor and rolled up into a ball. Sabon’s face went slack, and I saw a momentary flicker of pain—the ghost of regret, perhaps?—and then it was gone. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she fainted.

The flesh necklace, now adding their cries to the growing cacophony, parted to let Raffe and Sonter carry Mary away, Sonter cursing my name. Even in unconsciousness, a look of utter terror and helplessness marred her face.

No one else wanted to pick up the glasses, so I did. After all, they were mine. I folded them and put them back in my pocket. They were still warm.

I was trembling and exhausted; watching Mary struggle had taken all of my energy. I still cannot decide if it was relief or horror that drained me. I still can’t decide if what I did was right or wrong.

What had Mary seen? I don’t know. I had stopped wearing the glasses more than two weeks before. Released from Duncan’s expert guidance, they had become stranger and stronger somehow, as if they now pierced through layers of reality deeper than even the gray caps were meant to see. But whatever she saw, it was the truth—in one massive dose.

I’ve thought about whether I should put them on again—I’ve thought about it the entire time I’ve been typing up this account. Might I see
all the way through
? Might I see through the golden threads, if they exist, to something else entirely? Or would I just fall, and keep falling?

I do know this—sometimes, afterwards, I’ve had a daydream in which I seek Mary out once the glasses come off, and I find her weeping in a corridor in the bowels of the hotel, and I sit down beside her and I hold her close and I say, “Please—forgive me.” But sometimes in the daydream I’m also saying, “I forgive you, Mary. I forgive you.”

I bought a few newspapers after I came here, but all they can tell me is that “Sabon is recovering from a bout of exhaustion.” None of them mentions my role in her exhaustion.

And that is all I know, and all I want to know.

I halted on the edge of an abyss when I left Mary, I think. I halted on the edge of a kind of Silence. I needed to write it down, try to make some sense of it outside of my own head. Draw the poison.

But I’ve shed my last skin. I’ve no more skins to shed. I can’t start over again—I’ve started over too many times before. You won’t believe me.
I
won’t believe me, either.

Maybe all of this was prevarication and excuses and not an afterword at all. Not an essay. Not a history. Not a pamphlet. Just an old woman’s ramblings. Maybe I don’t want to think about that hole in the ground behind me and the decision I have to make. But if so, at least it’s over now. I have told you everything I meant to tell you, and more.

As I sit here in the green light and review these pages, I see what Duncan saw when he wrote in this room—the sliver, the narrowness of vision, the small amount we know before we’re gone—and I realize that this account was a stab in the dark at a kind of truth, no matter how faltering: a brief flash of light against the silhouette of dead trees. This was the story of my life and my brother’s life, my brother and his Mary. {How could you think to tell such a story without me by your side, Janice?}

And, somehow, I have kept separate, hidden away in my mind, one single image of joy before disaster: my father, running across the unbearably green grass. And not what occurred after. Not what happened after.

I want that kind of joy, that epiphany, or a chance at it, at least, even if it kills me. {Must I echo to you your own words? That we are all connected by lines of glimmering light. How many times those words kept me alive, made me see approaching light in unending darkness? As Bonmot used to say in his sermons: “We are vessels of light—broken vessels, broken light, but vessels nonetheless.” Fragments across the void. It’s time to find you, Janice, and see what you’ve gotten yourself into.}

But you’re free now, regardless of what this was—afterword, afterwards. I release you to return to what you were before. If you can.

As for me, it is time to abandon even this dim green light for the darkness. I’ve put as many words between myself and this decision as I can, but it hasn’t worked. There’s a space between each word that I can’t help but fall into, and those spaces are as wide as the words and twice as treacherous.

A shift of attention. Another place to go. That’s all it is. I’m not afraid anymore. I’m not frightened. Everyone is dead or disappeared or disappointed. I ask you,
who
is left to be afraid of? This is After Dad Died. This is After Mom Died. This is an entirely new place.

I think it is time for one last walk outside. One last look at this crazed, beautiful, dirty, sad, glorious city. Sybel and Bonmot and my mom and all the rest are waiting for me out there in some form or another—a whisper on the breeze, the rustle of the branches, a shadow across a wall, and, perhaps, there will be time for one last lunch under the willows, my glasses safely in my pocket. Then I’ll come back and decide whether or not to seek out Duncan, whether to put on these glasses and face whatever Mary saw.

No one makes it out,
Samuel Tonsure once said.

Or do they?

by Sirin

My role in all of this is complicated and compromised because I know or knew almost all of the people mentioned in Janice’s manuscript, not least of whom was Janice herself. I was always fond of Janice, perhaps more than I should have been, but confronted with her typewritten manuscript, I felt much as I had felt several years before when confronted by Duncan’s six hundred pages of early history: overwhelmed, irritated, fatigued, intrigued, and perplexed. I’ve always thought Janice had the best intentions, but also that her biases and her own obsessions sometimes led her to suspect conclusions. Many of these suspect conclusions had made their way into the afterword she left behind, and this explains, or helps to explain, my actions with regard to it. I hope.

I found the original typewritten pages in the back room of the Spore of the Gray Cap. I had gone there searching for Janice, as she had not shown up for her job in over a month. Since we had a professional history, I felt an obligation to find out what might be wrong. In fact, given our personal history, I felt more than an obligation—I was worried about her.

Given the events that had taken place at Martin Lake’s party—events accurately described in Janice’s account—I thought it likely she was “hiding” from a sense of shame or embarrassment. I never realized she might be writing a highly inflammatory, perhaps even actionable, history of her life and her brother’s life.

When I found the manuscript, it lay in a disorganized mess of pages beside her typewriter. The typewriter had become clogged with a green lichen or fungus; the entire shell overtaken by the spread of this loamy green substance. If I had arrived only a day later, the manuscript also might have succumbed to this same affliction.

I examined the pages briefly—long enough, however, to ascertain who had written the text and to note the comments added by Duncan, whose handwriting and attitude are familiar to me from our association over the years.

Beyond the desk, on the floor near the wall, a series of loose boards partially covered up a hole that led down into the ground. Once I saw the hole, I left quickly, pausing only to gather up the manuscript pages.

After I returned to my office with the manuscript and read through it, I was baffled as to what to do next. While many of the sections dealing with Ambergris’ recent history had a general ring of truth to them, these were inextricably interwoven with sections that contained the most outrageous accusations and assertions. What was true and what false, I might never know.

Figure 1: Janice Shriek’s typewriter. As the reader can see from this photo, the typewriter keys had been infiltrated by mushrooms. Many of the keys were brittle and fell off within weeks of taking the machine out of its room at the Spore of the Gray Cap. The typewriter disintegrated entirely within five months.

Neither could I corroborate any statements made about Janice’s family—despite the mention of family papers and Duncan’s journal in the manuscript, no such documents had been in evidence at the Spore of the Gray Cap. Worst of all, the manuscript did such a disservice to the reputation and character of my author Mary Sabon that from a purely professional point of view I was disinclined to attempt publication. However, paramount above all other concerns, I sincerely believed that Duncan or Janice would walk into my offices at any moment to reclaim the manuscript. So, for several years, I held on to it. I could not bring myself to destroy it. Nor could I bring myself to let the public have its way with the account.

However, it gradually became clear that Janice and Duncan had disappeared, possibly forever. Oddly enough, the owner of the Spore still swears that Janice never left his establishment on the day she would have finished her account—that she simply disappeared from the room, presumably through the hole in the floor. Similarly, the owner claims he never saw Duncan during the time Duncan must have been adding his comments to the manuscript.

That Duncan had been missing for several weeks before Martin Lake’s party is supported only by the unsubstantiated statements in Janice’s manuscript. As he was unemployed at the time of his supposed disappearance, no one, not even members of AFTOIS, noticed his absence. Still, it is true that he has not been seen in Ambergris since commenting on Janice’s manuscript. It has been almost four years.

As for Janice, not much more is known about her whereabouts. The current rumor is that a person fitting her description fell (or was pushed—we will never know) into the path of a motored vehicle on the same day Janice seems to have finished her account. Supposedly, a wooden foot was found near the scene, but the body was too badly mangled to be identifiable.

Once it was clear the Shrieks would not be coming back, I pulled out the manuscript again and reread it. In the three years that had passed, many strange things had happened in the city, so that even the most bizarre parts of the account no longer seemed quite so ridiculous. But there was still the issue of its portrayal of Mary. I decided to show Mary the manuscript and let her decide its fate. It may seem that I abrogated my responsibility in doing so, but I felt I had no choice.

To my surprise, Mary told me Hoegbotton & Sons
should
publish it. She was quite adamant about it, and further instructed me not to delete or soften any references to her, regardless of how unflattering. She became very emotional on this point, and I had the impression she wished I had shown her the manuscript the day I had found it.

Obeying Mary’s wishes, I did not make many edits of substance in preparing Janice’s account for publication. I did, in some instances, smooth out the text—for example, fixing the grammatical errors in those sections written in exceptional haste. Likewise, I corrected all spelling errors. Where Janice had alternate versions of a page or scene—which occurred with some frequency—I chose the more polished of the two. I also untangled Janice’s handwritten corrections from Duncan’s comments, deciding that placing the latter in parentheses and removing parentheses from Janice’s text was the most elegant solution to a potentially wearisome problem. Where she spent too long on a subject, or lost focus completely, I did excise text, but the entirety of these deletions constitutes only five or six paragraphs in total. I may have erred too far on the side of preservation in this case—some of the discussion of Duncan’s theories strikes me as tedious—but better tedium than claims I was overzealous in my editing duties.

I also deleted Duncan’s final comment on Janice’s manuscript, which he wrote on the page following her last chapter. I did this not because I wanted to, but because I
had
to. The comment was illegible. I had several handwriting experts examine the sentence. None could come to any agreement as to how it might have read. The most coherent interpretation? “Confluence of light between towers and being there at the right time leapt forward.” I include the phrase here despite my best instincts to do otherwise. My sole addition to the text consisted of fleshing out one or two scenes where Janice’s descriptive powers deserted her, but only in cases where I had been privy to the same information.

A further complication concerned the fungal contamination of the pages, coupled with the haphazard way in which the pages had been stacked on the table at the Spore. On some pages, the words were barely legible, and many pages or sections were out of order, several lacking the page numbers that might have allowed me to easily sequence them. I erred on the side of chronological order—even though Janice did not always adhere to such an order—but it is possible I made a few errors in my sequencing.

Figure 2: A reproduction of a sample page from Janice Shriek’s manuscript. Despite Duncan’s admonishment about the unimportance of Janice’s description of a transformed Ambergris, I did not delete the text as he requested; nor did I delete anything in the manuscript that Duncan edited out. After careful consideration, I did, however, delete a half-dozen paragraph-length oddities that bore no discernible relation to the rest of the text, since I felt that these digressions would distract from the text more than they added to it. The careful reader will note that the page reproduced above contains one of these deleted segments.

Therefore, I have clearly made editorial decisions with regard to Janice’s manuscript which some may consider to be too invasive, no matter how slight. But what is not true, despite the rumors, is that
An Afterword to the Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris
represents an elaborate deception on my part. Not only is the manuscript genuine (see the reproduction of a sample page herein), but I had nothing to do with writing it. Nor is Hoegbotton & Sons only publishing it now due to the sharp upturn in sales of Duncan’s books.
¹

I have no doubt that the publication of this book will generate fierce discussion about the merits of Nativism, about the aims of the gray caps, and about the nature of the Shift that has increasingly disrupted life in Ambergris. Some will feel that Duncan is about to be vindicated in the most dramatic of ways.

In preparing the manuscript for publication, I have, for that very reason, experienced fresh doubts about making it available. We live in a very volatile time and I would not want this book to be a catalyst for extremism. Nor, I would hope, will readers jump to unsupportable conclusions having read it. I know that many people are clutching at whatever they can to make sense of the odd events that, on certain days, seem destined to overwhelm all of us. My sincere hope is that this book will not push anyone over the edge.