Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  As I read, I became struck by the way that half-truths wounded Duncan’s cause more seriously than outright lies. He stumbled, he faltered throughout the book, but continued on anyway—persevering past the point where any reasonable person might have given up on such a hopeless trek.

  Oddly, it made me love him for being brave, and it almost made me cry as well. I knew that he held our father in his head as he wrote, running toward him across the summer grass. That, I could respect. But by not revealing all, he became lost in the land between, where lies always sound like lies, and so does the truth. He could not protect the gray caps and satisfy serious readers without betraying both groups. {The gray caps needed no protection, only the readers. Janice, you may now be beyond protection, but there are still things that can be done for those aboveground.}

  In part due to these defects, Cinsorium had a peculiar publication history. It became an instant bestseller when the Kalif’s Minister of Literature, rather than ban the book, had his operatives buy all available copies and ship them off to the Court. Readers in the South bought most of the second printings, the Kalif distracted by warfare with the Skamoo on his northern border. However, despite the sale of more than fifty thousand copies, Hoegbotton refused to go to a third printing.

  Certainly the strange and curious silence created by the book must be seen as a reason for Hoegbotton’s reluctance to reprint Cinsorium. This silence occurred among those most raucous of vultures, critics. In the superheated atmosphere that is the Southern book culture, such omissions rarely occur. Even the most modest self-published pulp writer can find space in local book review columns. {Fear. It was fear.} This lack of attention proved fatal, for although many journals noted the book’s publication in passing, only two actual reviews ever appeared, both in a fringe publication edited by James Lacond. Lacond, a passing acquaintance of Duncan’s even in those days before the war, wrote that, “Subtle subjects require subtle treatments. For every two steps back, Shriek takes three steps forward, so that in the circular but progressive nature of his arguments one begins to see this pattern, but also a certain truth emerging.” Perhaps. Perhaps not. {At least someone was prepared to accept it!}

  But none of these events concerned me, not in light of what I thought the book told me about Duncan. The book, I felt, was an argument between Duncan and Duncan, and not about any of the surface topics in the book. Duncan did not know what, exactly, he had seen while underground. He had only a rudimentary understanding of the gray caps. {This is true—I didn’t know what I’d seen. But I couldn’t keep what I didn’t know to myself. How could I? I saw too many things that might shake someone’s worldview.} This kept alive Duncan’s compulsion to do what I most feared: return to the underground until he felt he understood…everything.

  Perhaps it should not have surprised me that Duncan’s next four books settled back into the realm of acceptable accomplishment. Duncan reverted to the scholarship that had been his trademark. It was too late, of course. It didn’t, and couldn’t, matter, because the cowardly critics who had refused to review Cinsorium had read it. And so Duncan’s scholarly style steadily lost readers seeking further crass sensationalism, while critics savaged later books, most of them omitting any reference to Cinsorium. It hung over Duncan’s work like a ghost, an echo. The reviews that did appear dismissed Duncan’s work in ways that made him appear a crank, a misfit, even a heretic. {I’ve always blamed Gaudy for this, although for a long time I had no proof, or even a coherent theory. But I now believe Gaudy used his connections to blacklist me in typical F&L fashion—with the underhanded compliment, the innuendo, the insinuation. Did Gaudy do more than meet with a few influential journal editors? Perhaps not, but that might have been enough.} They appended the story of his banning by Bonmot in harmful ways: “This, the latest offering from the author who blasphemed against the Truffidian Church, concerns…” It did not matter what it concerned.

  Shortly after the publication of Vagaries of Circumstance and Fate Amongst the Clans of the Aan, Hoegbotton announced that Duncan had been dropped from their stable of writers. Gaudy must have been laughing from behind his rosewood desk in Morrow. No other publisher of note would prove interested in Duncan’s sixth book. None of his books would long remain in print. For all practical purposes, Duncan’s career as a writer of historical books had come to an end, along with any hopes of serious consideration as a historian. At the age of thirty-three.

  It would only get worse after he met Sabon, who would spend much of her time chipping away at Duncan’s respectability, so that his books no longer contained anything but metaphorically shredded pages.

  Odd. It strikes me for the first time that Duncan has been preparing me for this moment all of my life. There’s a green light shining upon the typewriter keys, and maybe it’s the light that allows me to see so clearly. Must we always be blind to those we are close to? Must we always fumble for understanding? Duncan never mistrusted me. He just didn’t want me to implode from the information he had—he wanted to dole it out in pieces, so that it would not be such a shock to my system. And yet it would have been a shock, no matter how gradual. I don’t see how it could be otherwise.

  If Duncan feared losing me, he must have also feared losing his audience.

  Which reminds me. I should ask: Am I losing you? Have I lost you already? I hope not. There’s still a war to come, for Truff ’s sake.

  Maybe the only solution is to start over.

  Should I? Perhaps I should.

  3

  We don’t see many things ahead of time. We usually only avoid disaster at the last second, pull back from the abyss by luck or fate or blind stupid chance. Exactly nine years before Mary Sabon began to destroy my brother like an old house torn down brick by brick, Duncan sought me out at my new Gallery of Hidden Fascinations. How he found me there, I still don’t know {a mundane story, involving broadsheet adverts and luck}. I had just bought the gallery—a narrow place off of Albumuth Boulevard {I remember when it was a sweets shop that also sold mood-altering mushrooms—a much more honest trade}—with the help of a merchant loan against our mother’s property along the River Moth. {That took some persuading!}

  Outside, the sky was a blue streaked with gold, the trees once again threatening to release their leaves, turning yellower and yellowest. The smell of burning leaves singed nostrils, but the relief of slightly lower temperatures added a certain spring to the steps of passersby.

  Half the proposed gallery lay in boxes around my feet. Paintings were stacked in corners, splashes of color wincing out from the edges of frames. Piles and piles of papers had swallowed my desk.

  I was happy. After years of unhappiness. {It’s easy to think you’d been unhappy for years, but I remember many times you were invigorated, excited, by your art, by your studies. The past isn’t a slab of stone; it’s fragmented and porous.} By now I had given up my dream of a career as a painter. Rejection, rejection, rejection. It had made the part of me that wanted to paint wither away, leaving a more streamlined Janice, a smoother Janice, a less creative Janice. I had decided I would do better as a gallery owner, had not yet realized I was still traveling toward remote regions marked on maps only by terms such as “Art Critic” and “Historian.” {You were traveling toward me, Janice. That’s not such a bad thing.} Only later did I come to see my initial investment in the gallery as a form of self-torture: by promoting the works of others I could denigrate my own efforts.

  This time, Duncan had a haunted look about him, the joy of his previous underground adventures stripped away, leaving behind only a gauntness akin to death. The paleness that had taken over his features had blanched away any expression, any life, in his limbs, in his movements. He:

  Beard like the tendrils of finely threaded spores.

  Swayed in the doorway like a tall, ensanguinated ghost, holding the door open with one shaking, febrile arm.

  Shoes tattered and torn, as if savaged by a dog.

  Muttered my name as if in the middle of
a dream.

  Clothes stained everywhere with spores, reduced to a fine, metallic dust that glittered blackly all around him.

  Trailed tiny obsidian mushrooms, trembling off of him at every turn.

  Eyes embedded with black flecks, staring at some nameless vision just beyond me.

  Clutched something tightly in his left hand, knuckles pale against the dark coating of spore dust.

  He staggered inside, fell to the floor amid the paintings, the curled canvases, the naked frames vainglorious with the vision of the wall behind them. The gallery smelled of turpentine, of freshly cut wood, of drying paint. But as Duncan met the floor, or the floor met Duncan, the smells became one smell: the smell of Duncan. A dark green smell brought from deep underground. A subtle interweaving of minerals and flesh and fungus. The smell of old water trickling through stones and earth. The smell of lichen and moss. {Flesh penetrated by fungus, you mean—every pore cross-pollinated, supersaturated. Nothing very subtle about it. The flesh alive and prickly.} The smell, now, of my brother.

  I locked the door behind him. I slapped his face until his gaze cleared, and he saw me. With my help, he got to his feet and I took him into the back room. He was so light. He might as well have been a skeleton draped with canvas. I began to cry. His ribs bent against my encircling arm as I gently laid him down against a wall. His clothes were so filthy that I made him take them off and put on a painter’s smock.

  I forced bread and cheese on him. He didn’t want it at first. I had to tear the bread into small pieces and hold his mouth open. I had to make him close his mouth. “Swallow.” He had no choice. He couldn’t fight me—he was too weak. Or I was, for once, too strong.

  Eventually, he took the bread from my hands, began to eat on his own. Still he said nothing, staring at me with eyes white against the dust-stippled darkness of his forehead and jutting cheekbones.

  “When you are ready, speak,” I said. “You are not leaving here until you tell me exactly what happened. You are not leaving here until I know why. Why, Duncan? What happened to you?” I couldn’t keep the anguish from my voice.

  Duncan smiled up at me. A drunkard’s smile. A skeleton’s smile. My brother’s smile, as laconic as ever.

  “Same old sister,” he said. “I knew I could count on you. To half kill me trying to feed me.” {To help me. Who else would help me back then?}

  “I mean it. I won’t let you leave without telling me what happened.”

  He smiled again, but he wouldn’t look at me. For a long time, he said nothing as I watched him.

  Then the flood. He spoke and spoke and spoke—rambling, coherent, fragmented, clever. I began to grow afraid for him. All these words. There was already less than nothing inside of him. I could see that. When the last words had left his mouth, would even the canvas of his skin flap away free, the filigree of his bones disintegrate into dust? Slowly, I managed to hear the words and forget the condition of the one who spoke them. Forget that he was my brother.

  He had gone deeper into the underground this time, but the research had gone badly. He kept interspersing his account with mutterings that he would “never do it again.” And, “If I stay on the surface, I’m safe. I should be safe.” At the time, I thought he meant staying physically aboveground, but now I’m not so sure. {Be sure.} I wonder if he also meant the surface of his mind. That if he could simply restrain himself from the divergent thinking, the untoward analysis, that had marked some of his previous books, he might once again be a published writer. {Who knows? I might have given up on myself if forced to listen to my own ravings. I might have even become a respectable citizen.}

  As he spoke, I realized I wasn’t ready for his revelations. I had made a mistake—I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I needed distance from this shivering, shuddering wreck of a man. He clung to the edges of the smock I had given him like a corpse curling fingers around a coffin’s lining. The look on his face made me think of our father dying in the summer grass. It frightened me. I tried to put boundaries on the conversation.

  “What happened to the book you were working on?” I asked him.

  He grimaced, but the expression made him look more human, and his gaze turned inward, the horrors reflected there no longer trying to get out.

  “Stillborn,” he gasped, as if breaking to the surface after being held down in black water. He lurched to his feet, fell back down again. Every surface he touched became covered in fine black powder. “Stillborn,” he repeated. “Or I killed it. I don’t know which. Maybe I’m a murderer. I was…I was halfway through. On fire with ancient texts. Bloated with the knowledge in them. Didn’t think I needed firsthand experience to write the book. Such a web of words, Janice. I have never used so many words. I used so many there weren’t any left to write with. And yet, I still had this fear deep in my skull. I couldn’t get it out.” {I still can’t get it out of my head, sometimes. Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort.}

  He relinquished his grasp on the object in his hand, which I had almost forgotten.

  It rolled across the floor. We both stared at it, he as astonished as I. A honey-and-parchment-colored ball. Of flesh? Of tissue? Of stone?

  He looked up at me. “I remember now. It needs moisture. If it dries, it dies. Cracks form in its skin. It’s curled into a ball to preserve a pearl of moisture between its cilia.”

  “What is it?” I said, unable to keep the fear from my voice.

  He grinned in recognition of my tone. “Before Dad died,” he said, “you would have found this creature a wonderful mystery. You would have followed me out into the woods and we would have dug up fire-red salamanders just to see their eyes glow in the dark.”

  “No,” I said. “No. There was no time when I would have found this thing a wonderful mystery. Where did you find it?”

  His smirk, the way it ate up his face, the way it accentuated the suddenly taut bones in his neck, made the flesh around his mouth a vassal to his mirth, sickened me.

  “Where do you think it came from?”

  I ignored the question, turned away, said, “I have a canteen of water in the front, near my desk. But keep talking. Keep telling me about your book.”

  He frowned as I walked past him into the main room of the gallery. From behind me, his disembodied voice rose up, quavered, continued. A thrush caught in a hunter’s snare, flapping this way and that, ever more entangled and near its death. His smell had coated the entire gallery. In a sense, I was as close to him searching for the canteen as if I stood beside him. Beyond the gallery windows lay the real world, composed of unnaturally bright colors and shoppers walking briskly by.

  “So I never finished it, Janice. What do you think of that? I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. I wrote and wrote. I wrote with the energy of ten men each evening. All texts I consulted interlocked under my dexterous manipulations. It all made such perfect sense…and then I began to panic. Each word, I realized, had been leading me further and further away from the central mystery. Every sentence left a false trail. Every paragraph formed another wall between me and my thesis. Soon, I stopped writing. It had all been going so well. How could it get so bad so quickly?

  “I soon found out. I backtracked through the abyss of words, searching for a flaw, a fissure, a crack in the foundation. Perhaps some paragraph had turned traitor and would reveal itself. Only it wasn’t a paragraph. It was a single word, five pages from the end of my silly scribblings, in a sentence of no particular importance. Just a single word. I know the sentence by heart, because I’ve repeated it to myself over and over again. It’s all that’s left of my book. Do you want to hear it?”

  “Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t sure. I was still searching for the canteen under all the canvases.

  “Here it is: ‘But surely, if Tonsure had not known the truth then, he knew it after traveling underground.’ The word was ‘truth,’ and I could not get past the truth.
The truth stank of the underground, buried under dead leaves and hidden in cold, dry, dark caverns. The truth had little to do with the surface of things.

  “From that word, in that context, on that page, written in my nearly illegible hand, my masterwork, my beautiful, marvelous book unraveled syllable by syllable. I began by crossing out words that did not belong in the sentence. Then I began to delete words by rules as illegitimate and illogical as the gray caps themselves. Until after a week, I woke up one morning, determined to continue my surgical editing of the manuscript—only to find that not even the original sentence had been spared: all that remained of my once-proud manuscript was that single word: ‘truth.’ And, truth, my dear sister, was not a big enough word to constitute an entire book—at least not to me.” {Or my publishers, come to think of it. If there had been any publishers.}

  I had found the canteen. I came back into the room and handed it to him. “You should drink some. Rinse out the lie you’ve just told.”

  He snorted, took the canteen, raised it to his lips, and, drinking from it, kissed it as seriously as he would a lover.

  “Perhaps it is in part a metaphor,” he said, “but it is still, ironically enough, the truth.”

  “Don’t speak in metaphors, then. How do you tell truth from lies otherwise?”

  “I want to be taken literally.”

  “You mean literarily, Duncan. Except you’ve already been taken literarily—they’ve all ravished you and gone on to the next victim.”

  “Literally.”

  “Is that why you brought this horrible rolled up ball of an animal with you?”

  “No. I forgot I had it. Now that I’ve brought it here, I can’t let it die.” {Actually, Janice, I did bring it with me on purpose. I had just forgotten the purpose.}