Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  But now the detail becomes too detailed, and again your eyes blur, and you decide maybe movement will save you—that perhaps if you move to the other side of the machine, you will find something different, something that does not call out remorselessly for your surrender. Because if you stand there for another minute, you will enmesh yourself in the machine. You will climb up into the flesh and metal. You will curl up to something pale and sticky and embrace it. You will relax your body into the space allowed it, your legs released from you in a spray of blood and wire, you smiling as it happens, your eyes already dulled, and dreaming some communal dream, your tongue the tongue of the machine, your mouth humming in another language, your arms weighed down with tendrils of metal, your torso split in half to let out the things that must be let out.

  For a long time, you stand on the fissure between sweet acceptance of dissolution and the responsibility of movement, the enticing smell of decay, the ultimate inertia, reaching out to you…but, eventually, you move away, with an audible shudder that shakes your bones, almost pulls you apart.

  As you hobble around to the side of the machine, you feel the million eyes of the crumpled, huddled white shapes snap open, for a single second drawn out of their dreams of you.

  There is no history, no present. There are only the sides of the machine. Slick memory of metal, mad with its own brightness, mad with the memory of what it contains. You cling to those sides for support, but make your way past them as quickly as possible. The sides are like the middle of a book—necessary, but quickly read through to get to the end. Already, you try in vain to forget the beginning.

  The front of the machine has a comforting translucent or reflective quality. You will never be able to decide which quality it possesses, although you stand there staring at it for days, ensnared by your own foolish hope for something to negate the horrible negation of the machine’s innards. Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes. A mountain range at sunset, distant, ruined towers propped up by the foothills at its flanks. Always flickering into perfection and back into oblivion. Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen, or heard mention of their existence. Ever.

  You slide into the calm of these scenes, although you cannot forget the white shapes behind the machine, the eyelids that flicker as these images flicker. Only the machine knows, and the machine is damaged. Its thoughts are damaged. Your thoughts are damaged: they run liquid-slow through your brain, even though you wish they would stop.

  After several days, your vision strays and unfocuses and you blink slowly, attention drawn to a door at the very bottom of the mirror. The door is as big as the machine. The door is as small as your fingernail. The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so minute you could reach out and touch it. The door is translucent—the images that flow across the screen sweep across the door as well, so that it is only by the barely perceived hairline fracture of its outline that it can be distinguished beneath the desert, ocean, mountains, that glide across its surface. The door is a mirror, too, you realize, and after so long of not focusing on anything, letting images run through you, you find yourself concentrating on the door and the door alone. In many ways, it is an ordinary door, almost a nonexistent door. And yet, staring at it, a wave of fear passes over you. A fear so blinding it paralyzes you. It holds you in place. You can feel the pressure of all that meat, all that flesh, all the metal inside the machine amassed behind that door. It is an unbearable weight at your throat. You are buried in it, in a small box, under an eternity of rock and earth. The worms are singing to you through the rubble. The worms know your name. You cannot think. Your head is full of blood. You dare not breathe.

  There is something behind the door.

  There is something behind the door.

  There is something behind the door.

  The door begins to open inward, and something fluid and slow, no longer dreaming, begins to come out from inside, lurching around the edge of the door. You begin to run—to run as far from that place as you possibly can, screaming until your throat fills with the blood in your head, your head now an empty globe while the rest of you drowns in blood. And still it makes no difference, because you are back in that place with the slugs and the skulls and the pale dreamers and the machine that doesn’t work that doesn’t work that doesn’t work that doesn’t work that doesn’t work atdoeswor doeswor doewor dowor door…

  This entry about a defective “machine” built by the gray caps is the strangest part of my brother’s journal. By far. In its pure physicality I sense a level of discomfort rare for Duncan. As if, from fretful tossing and turning, he woke, reached for pen and notepad from the nightstand, and wrote down his first impressions of a fading nightmare. He appears at first anxious to record the experience, and then less so, the use of second person intended to place the burden of memory on the reader, to purge the images from his head. {It is more that I could not find words to accurately convey what I saw, and so I tried to describe how I felt instead—in a sense presaging Ambergrisians’ reaction to the recent Shift.}

  If Duncan had, in the gallery that afternoon, told me about the machine with the calm madness of that journal entry, a silence would have settled over us. Our conversation would have faded away into a nothingness made alive and aware by his words. Thankfully, Duncan told his story with less than brutal lucidity. He used stilted words in rows of sentences crippled by fits and starts—a vagabond, poorly-rehearsed circus of words that could not be taken seriously. He focused on the front of the machine with its marvelous visions of far-distant places. He dismissed the back of the machine with a single sentence. Somehow, I could not reconcile his vision with my memory of the spores floating out of my apartment window.

  Even so, an element of unreality entered the gallery following his revelation. I remember staring at him and thinking that his face could not be composed of flesh and blood, not with those words coming from his mouth. The light now hid his features, but his hands, lit by the starfish, glowed white.

  “The door in the machine never fully opens,” Duncan said in a distant tone.

  “What would happen if it did?”

  “They would be free….”

  “Who?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

  “The gray caps.”

  “Free of what?”

  Pale hands, darkened face, gray speech. “I think they care nothing for us one way or the other, Janice. They have only one purpose now. The same purpose they’ve had for centuries.”

  “In your unconfirmed opinion, brother,” I said, and shivered at the way the mushroom dust on his face still glittered darkly.

  “What do you know about the Silence?”

  “The gray caps killed everyone in the city,” I said.

  He shook his head. Forgetting the starfish in his hands, he stood abruptly. The starfish fell to the floor and began to curl and uncurl in a reflexive imitation of pain. Now Duncan was stooped over me. Now he was crouched beside me. If there were ever a secret he truly wanted to tell me, this was the secret. This was the cause of it. We had returned to the last survivor of his sixth book, alive amid all of the suicides: the truth. As my brother saw it.

  “You learned it wrong,” he told me. “That’s not what happened. It didn’t happen like that. I’ve seen so many things, and I’ve thought a lot about what I’ve seen. They disappeared without a single drop of blood left behind. Not a fragment of bone. No. They weren’t killed. At least not directly. Try to imagine a different answer: a sudden miscalculation, a botched experiment, a flaw in the machine. All of those people. All twenty-five thousand of them. The men, the women, the children—they didn’t die. They were moved. The door opened in a way the
gray caps didn’t expect, couldn’t expect, and all those people—they were moved by mistake. The machine took them to someplace else. And, yes, maybe they died, and maybe they died horribly—but my point is, it was all an accident. A mistake. A terrible, pointless blunder.”

  He was breathing heavily. Sweat glistened on his arms, where before the black dust had suppressed it.

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “That’s the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life. They’ve killed thousands of people. They’ve done terrible things. And you have the nerve to make apologies for them?!”

  “Would it be easier to accept that they don’t give a damn about us one way or the other if we hadn’t massacred them to build this city? What I think is crazy is that we try to pretend they are just like us. If we had massacred most of the citizens of Morrow, we would expect them to seek revenge. That would be natural, understandable, even acceptable. But what about a people that, when you slaughter hundreds of them, doesn’t even really notice? That doesn’t acknowledge the event? We can’t accept that reaction. That would be incomprehensible. So we tack the idea of ‘revenge’ onto the Silence so we can sleep better at night—because we think, we actually have the nerve to think, that we understand these creatures that live beneath us. And if we think we understand them, if we believe they are like us in their motivations, then we don’t fear them quite as much. If we meet one in an alley, we believe we can talk to it, reason with it, communicate with it. Or if we see one dozing beneath a red flag on the street during the day, we overlook it, we make it part of the scenery, no less colorful or benign than a newly ordained Truffidian priest prancing down Albumuth Boulevard in full regalia.”

  “You’re crazy, Duncan. You’re unwell.” Anger again burned inside of me. The idea of the Silence reduced to a pathetic mistake enraged me. The idea that my own brother might utter the words that made it so seemed a betrayal of an unspoken understanding between us. Before this moment, we could always count on sharing the same worldview no matter what happened, even when we saw each other at wider and wider intervals.

  “It’s more complicated than you think,” he said. “They are on a journey as much as we are on a journey. They are trying to get somewhere else—but they can’t. It doesn’t work. With all they can do, with all they are, they still cannot make their mirror, their glass, work properly. Isn’t that sad? Isn’t that kind of sad?”

  I slapped him across the face. My hand came away black with spores. He did not move an inch.

  “Sad?” I said. “Sad? Sad is twenty-five thousand lives snuffed out, not a broken machine. Not a broken machine! What is happening to you that you cannot see that? Regardless of what happened. Not that I believe you. Frankly, I don’t believe you. Why should I? For all I know, you’ve been in the sewers for the past few weeks, living off of rats and whatever garbage you could get your hands on. And all you’ve seen is the reflection of your own filthy face in a pool of scummy water!”

  Duncan smiled and pointed at the starfish. “How do you explain that?”

  “Ha!” I said. “It was probably groveling for garbage along with you. It definitely isn’t proof of anything, if that’s what you mean. Why didn’t you bring something substantive, like a gray cap willing to corroborate your statement?”

  “I did bring a gray cap,” he said. “Several, in fact. Although not by choice. Take a good look through the doorway, out the front window, to the left. I doubt they would corroborate anything, though. I think they’d like to see me dead.”

  “Don’t joke.”

  “I’m not. Take a look.”

  Reluctantly, I raised myself, my left leg asleep—even less impressed by Duncan’s story, apparently, than I was. I peered around the doorway. Sheathed like swords by the fading light, more sharp shadow than dream, three gray caps stood staring in through the window. They stood so still the cobblestones of the street behind them seemed more alive. The whites of their eyes gleamed like wet paint. They stared at and through me. As if I meant nothing to them. The sight of them sent a convulsive shudder through me. I ducked back, beside Duncan.

  “Maybe we should leave by the back door,” I said.

  A low, humorless laugh from Duncan. “Maybe they came for your gallery opening.”

  “Very funny. Follow me….”

  In a pinch, I still trusted my brother more than anyone else in the world.

  Every human being is a puppet on strings, but the puppet half controls the strings, and the strings do not ascend to some anonymous Maker, but are glistening golden strands that connect one puppet to another. Each strand is sensitive to the vibrations of every other strand. Every vibration sings in not only the puppet’s heart, but in the hearts of many other puppets, so that if you listen carefully, you can hear a low hum as of many hearts singing together…. When a strand snaps, when it breaks for love, or lack of love, or from hatred, or from pain…every other connected strand feels it, and every other connected heart feels it—and since every strand and every heart are, in theory, connected, even if at their most distant limits, this means the effect is universal. All through the darkness where shining strings are the only light, a woundedness occurs. And this hurt affects each strand and each puppet in a different way, because we are all puppets on strings and we all hurt and are hurt. And all the strings shimmer on regardless, and all of our actions, no matter how small, have consequences to other puppets…. After we are dead, gone to join the darkness between the lines of light, the strands we leave behind still quiver their lost messages into the hearts of those other puppets we met along the way, on our journey from light into not-light. These lost strands are the memories we leave behind…. Magnify this effect by 25,000 souls and perhaps you can see why I cannot so lightly dismiss what you call a mistake. Each extinguished life leaves a hole in many other lives—a series of small extinguishments that can never be completely forgotten or survived. Each survivor carries a little of that void within them.

  This is part of a letter I wrote to Duncan—the only attempt following our conversation to express my feelings about the Silence to him. One day I came home to my apartment early to find Duncan gone on some errand. For some reason I had been thinking about the Silence that day, perhaps because two or three new acquisitions had featured, in the background, the shadowy form of a gray cap. I sat down at my desk and wrote Duncan a letter, which I then placed in his briefcase full of papers, expecting he’d come across it in a week or a month. But he never mentioned it to me. I never knew whether he had read it or not until, going through his things after this final disappearance, I found it in a folder labeled simply “Janice.” {I did read it, and I cried. At the time, it made me feel more alone than I had ever felt before. Only later did I find it a comfort.}

  Duncan stayed at my apartment for nearly six months. By the fifth month, he appeared to have made a full recovery. We did not often speak of that afternoon when he had told me his theory about the Silence. In a sense, we decided to forget about it, so that it took on the hazy lack of detail specific only to memory. We were allowed that luxury back then. We did not have Sabon’s glittering necklace of flesh to set us straight.

  The starfish lasted four months and then died in a strobe of violent light, perhaps deprived of some precious nutrient, or perhaps having attained the end of its natural life cycle. Its bleached skeleton on the mantel carried hardly more significance than a snail’s shell found by the riverbank.

  4

  Time to start over. Another dead white page to fill with dead black type, so I’ll fill it. Why not? I’ve nothing better to do, for now anyway. Mary’s still holding court at the bottom of that marble staircase at Lake’s party, but I think I’ll make her wait a little longer.

  Especially since it strikes me that at this point in the narrative, or somewhere around here, Duncan would have paused to catch his breath, to regroup and place events in historical context. {If it were me, I would have skipped “historical context” and returned to that marble staircase, since that’s r
eally the only part of this story I don’t know already.} Years passed. They seem now like pale leaves pressed between the pages of an obscure book.

  Oddly enough, I don’t give a damn about historical context at the moment. I can see the sliver of green light becoming dull, indifferent—which means the sun is going down outside. And we all know what happens, or can happen, when the sun goes down, don’t we? Don’t answer that question—read this instead:

  The death of composer/politician Voss Bender and the rise of the Reds and Greens, who debate his legacy with knives: a civil war in the streets, which the trader Hoegbotton uses to solidify control of the city. I witness a man die right outside my gallery, hit in the head with a rock until his skull resembles a collection of broken eggshells dripping with red-gray mush. No art to it that I could see. No reason, either. Followed by: defeat of the Reds, disbanding of the Greens, the tossing of Bender’s ashes in the River Moth—only, the wise old river doesn’t want them, according to legend, and blows them back in the faces of the assembled mourners; thus dispersing Bender all across the city when the mourners go home. Scandal in the Truffidian Church—boring as only a Truffidian scandal can be: oh my goodness, the Antechamber Henry Bonmot, whom I still miss terribly, has been caught taking money from the collection plates! At the same time, the River Moth overflows its banks for a season and takes a sizable portion of our mother’s property with it, making us officially heirs of Nothing but an old, rotting mansion. The Kalif of the Western Empire chokes on a plum pit, replaced by another faceless bureaucrat. Meanwhile, infant mortality continues to decline, along with the birth rate, while old people die in droves from a heat stroke that withers even the hardiest southern trees. A slight upswing in the fortunes of motored vehicles due to an influx of oil from the Southern Islands is offset by a plummet in the availability of spare parts. Voss Bender’s posthumously produced opera, Trillian, reaches the two-year mark of its first run, its full houses unscathed by the dwindling tourist trade {no one likes to die while on holiday, whether by heat stroke or by gray cap}. Other composers and playwrights, who could really use the Bender Memorial Theater as a venue for their own drivel, gnash their teeth and whine in the back rooms of bars and taverns: Bender, dead, still lives on! Three Festivals of the Freshwater Squid pass by without so much as a pantomime of real violence—what is wrong with us as a people, I ask you, that we have become so passive? Are we not animals? Perhaps this squalid, shameful peace has something to do with the introduction of the telephone, at least for the well off, which allows Ambergrisians to call up total strangers and breathe at them, make funny noises, or vent our rage at the string of flat, bloodless festivals. The telephone: come to us from the Kalif, his empire, a domesticated beast, taken to colonizing through commerce rather than warfare; the ghost of the rebel Stretcher Jones, as Duncan might have put it, would never have recognized this temporarily toothless Empire, slumped back on its haunches. Inexplicably, guns arrive with the telephone. Lots of guns. In all types and sizes, mostly imported through Hoegbotton & Sons. Hoegbotton’s armed importer-exporters, now doing a brisk trade in bandages, tourniquets, and bolted locks, are respected and feared the length and breadth of the River Moth—except by the operatives of Frankwrithe & Lewden, who continue their quiet infiltrations of Hoegbotton territory. More festivals, replete with the sound of gunplay. More years of Trillian and its vainglorious blather; will Voss Bender never die? Yes, this really is a historical summary of which my brother would be proud. {Not really, but think anything you like.}