Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  We took the sadly amateurish hand-printed playbills off our seats and sat, Lacond still occluding all sight of Mary on the other side. In the expectant green light, the muted chatter of people still entering the opera house, the pauses in conversation as three or four times it appeared the opera was about to begin, I had a glimpse, an echo, of my former life. For an instant, sitting there, my buttocks rapidly beginning to ache from the hard seat, I had the illusion that I had conjured up the resources, out of full-on ruin, to create an opera. For just that period between taking our seats and curtain rise, I felt powerful again. An awful feeling. I could see Edward’s slack face in the insane asylum, feel the ribbon of red rising from my wrist. I did not want that life back, not really.

  Besides, the illusion was ruined anyway by a brief encounter on the way to the bathroom before the opera began. Narrowed and wrinkled by the years, Merrimount’s jester face suddenly came into view.

  He nodded and said, “Did you have anything to do with this opera, Janice?”

  “No,” I said. “Not me.” Caught. Accused.

  “Ah, right,” he said. “I thought maybe you had.” A pause, and then, “Do you think this is what the New Art has all been leading up to? An insane opera performed during wartime?” His smile was all teeth, and then he was gone.

  I hated the elation that made my face flush, brought out a little shiver of happiness. Merrimount had talked to me. {Very sad, sister.}

  I told Duncan about the encounter, across Sybel’s thin chest and Lacond’s broad belly, and before he could respond, out of the darkness I heard Mary say, “If so, it’s been a waste. Everything leading up to this one performance. They should have saved it up for after the war.”

  I laughed, and Sybel, like a good former manager, said to Mary, “Merrimount means that except for him, Martin, and Janice, every member of the former New Art movement of any consequence is involved in this opera. It’s the only thing they’ve been able to agree on long enough to bring to the public attention.”

  Mary nodded, held her tongue. She knew Sybel didn’t like her, and she knew Sybel didn’t like her because I didn’t like her.

  “Admittedly, a captive audience,” Duncan said, “with nothing else to do except hunker down in their homes.”

  “True,” I said. “I suppose there is a hint of desperation in it.”

  Desperation during those days could not be hidden at the opera. In such close quarters, the truth of our diets would begin to manifest as a sour smell of stale bread and vegetable broth and, oddly enough, doorknobs. Some enterprising individual had discovered that many of the doorknobs in the city had been made from sawdust and ox blood. If heated and distilled, a doorknob could be eaten, given an extremity of hunger.

  “Martin and Merri are living on the kindness of friends and neighbors, you know,” Sybel said.

  “If he’s painting at all,” Duncan said, “it’s with borrowed canvases and stolen paints. He’ll get the odd job here and there, but work must be scarce.”

  “Yes it is, my dear Duncan,” I heard Mary whisper, “but you don’t need to worry.”

  He didn’t need to worry because Mary’s parents had conspired to acquire an apartment for her out of the way of both the local Hoegbotton and F&L militias, in an area that had not yet been the target of attacks or skirmishes. Mary, meanwhile, had yet to realize that, having taken Duncan in, she might have more worries than the average person where the gray caps were concerned. {She had less to worry about. Trust me. I protected her well.}

  My gaze burned through the darkness that protected Mary.

  “What are your plans after the war?” I asked Duncan.

  Was that the hint of a smile on my brother’s face?

  Mary answered for him, making Sybel sit up and pay attention, as if he had a bet riding on the answer: “The same as now. To continue my studies. To write books, like Duncan’s.”

  Well, it was true that she continued her studies during the war. In fact, the war often had no impact on her whatsoever, not emotionally. But she didn’t want to write books like Duncan’s. She wanted to write books like Duncan. That became clear soon enough.

  A hush fell over the audience. The lights could not dim, but the curtain could rise. It chose that moment to do so. I could either stare into the now silent darkness or turn toward the stage.

  The curtain rose. The green light was very much like the green light in this place, as I type this afterword. Here, I am on the stage. There, I was part of the audience. Not that there’s much difference.

  The opera began.

  Despite Gallendrace’s valiant efforts, it soon became clear that the opera would be a rather muddied affair. What more could one expect under the circumstances, hampered by lack of funds, lack of time, donated costumes and sets, and the shortage of many other supplies? But a certain unnecessary complexity also wreaked havoc with the production—too many parts and not enough actors. Further, men played most of the female parts and women played most of the male parts, which created a dissonant musical effect, tenors and sopranos popping up in the most unexpected places. It became increasingly difficult to keep track of all but the most major characters.

  Still, the main storyline had the kind of familiarity that is difficult to lose in translation, especially when you’re in the middle of the conflict in question. As in real life, the opera carefully related the particulars of a deadly war between merchant families.

  To put it plainly, what hawkish Sirin had anticipated so accurately was an economic invasion of Ambergris by Frankwrithe & Lewden, the type of invasion that only coincidentally results in bloodshed. For years, the constant pressure exerted by Hoegbotton & Sons on F&L in their home markets around Morrow had hindered Frankwrithe’s attempts to expand into Ambergris—although a tenuous toehold had been gained through influence on Antechamber book bannings and through bookstores large enough to ignore Hoegbotton intimidation. However, mere months before my enlightening trip to Morrow, F&L had managed to take over its governance from a failed monarchy, in the process issuing a decree banning all Hoegbotton agents and imports from the city. Hoegbotton found itself unable to mount an effective counteroffensive. {In part, F&L took advantage of H&S’ temporary shift of attention to trains and railways, a fixation that emanated from Henry Hoegbotton, the hoary but clever patriarch of the Hoegbotton clan. Henry Hoegbotton—of whom not enough has been written; if not for my present circumstances, I would attempt the biography myself—had hoped for an era of economic domination over all of the South, to the very tip of the last atoll of the Southern Isles, and all of the North, including the frozen Skamoo in their spackly ice huts. Many experts speculated that Hoegbotton might then wage “a holy war of commerce” against the closed markets of the Kalif’s empire. However, such a vision required Hoegbotton to overextend itself so much that it became unable to effectively respond to a threat like being banned from Morrow.}

  This new vision on the part of F&L explained the large numbers of their operatives that had dominated my view from the window of my {comfortable, furnished} prison{-like} cell. Emboldened by victory at home, F&L sought to bring their trade downriver, staking their chances not only on their diversification into a superior brand of typewriter, the Lewden Model II—a version of which I am typing on now and which I swear and sweat by; if only this fungus would not keep nibbling on the accursed keys—and long distance telephone services. In fact, many infiltrations of Ambergris began as the result of F&L agents installing telephone poles: not only did F&L inject liquid explosives into hollow portions of these poles, but the installers themselves formed a secret army of espionage in the city. F&L also funneled more and more funds into Ambergrisian banks, hoping to create influence in those quarters.

  Hoegbotton, naturally, resisted, and matters came to a head over Sophia’s Island, a curling finger of an atoll located north of Ambergris in the middle of the River Moth. The “Sophia” of Sophia’s Island was none other than the wife of Ambergris’ founder, Manzikert I—they had u
sed it as a summer residence many hundreds of years ago. Now, it occupied a strategic position in the northern trade routes: whoever controlled the island could levy all sorts of tariffs, and use the island as a storeroom to boot. An obscure lease on the island had been given to the rulers of Morrow, the Menite Kings, as a thank-you for their aid to Ambergris during the Silence. Despite the fall of the Menite Kings, the lease had never been withdrawn, and Frankwrithe & Lewden used it as pretext to lay claim to the island, with predictable results. The conflict that had begun on the island had spread to Ambergris, and had probably been an excuse to initiate open warfare.

  The opera attempted to convey the entire origin of the conflict in song using a motley collection of servants, bankers, merchants, and soldiers—a chorus of voices that stumbled ragged about the stage—while a forbidden love affair between members of the Hoegbotton and Frankwrithe clans—a plot device old long before Voss Bender took his first, tottering steps—played out in the foreground. A subplot involved two servants, one from each clan, and the odd appearance of a man from the Nimblytod Tribes, who observed from on high {in this case, two boxes set atop each other}, and provided sporadic narration—much to the disgust of Sybel, who muttered to me about “stereotypes.” The ghost of Sophia Manzikert also made many an appearance, fated to roam her beloved island as all manner of skullduggery occurred around her, and she unable to stop it.

  A hail of catcalls and whistles abused the singers when Sophia’s Island first appeared as a series of earth-colored potato sacks stitched together and held up by men dressed in black who were still, tragically, visible in the green light. As the island sailed toward the singers rather than the other way around, atonal booing drowned out the voices coming from the stage.

  Pieces of the music had clearly been stolen from Bender’s Trillian, as might be expected with Gallendrace in charge. The orchestra was short a flutist, his place taken by a rather aggressive whistler. {In fact, the entire orchestra sounded like the “scrittling, scratching brittlings of a skeleton crew,” as one wag put it.} A few holes in the floor of the stage—apparently there had been no time to repair them—resulted in Sophia’s ghost at one point pitching head-first into the orchestra pit, much to the delight of the audience, which stood and clapped. {We might have been glad to have an opera during wartime, but that didn’t mean we had given up our essential nature as Ambergrisians.}

  The {almost} corresponding holes in the curtain made scene breaks tantalizing, and scandalous, in that the audience could see the flash of thigh and buttock in the frenetic thrashing of costume changes. The set changes proved much less dramatic, as Gallendrace had chosen to use the set to suggest rather than illustrate, letting unpainted wooden boxes and other unconcealed objects serve as placeholders for the imagination.

  Still, it was a passable attempt at an opera. The orchestra lurched on even after Sophia fell on top of them. The singers had good voices—they had convinced the great retired baritone Samuel Rail to make a short appearance. However, the hole in the ceiling, even clogged with fungus, changed the acoustics in such a way that sometimes those voices came to us profoundly curdled or twisted; at times, I felt as if I were hearing the voices of gray caps, not human beings at all.

  Halfway through the second act, my legs beginning to fall asleep, I turned in my seat and looked back. Some ten rows behind us, I caught a glimpse of Bonmot with some of the teachers from Blythe Academy. I waved; he waved back. I was inspired for a moment to go talk to him, perhaps even join them—after all, Duncan had his Mary and Lacond had his Duncan, and Sybel was too busy being angry about the depiction of his people to be of much use to me. But it was then that Sophia fell into the orchestra pit, and as I turned back to watch the ensuing chaos, the moment was lost. By intermission, Bonmot had left for some reason {along with several others in the audience!}, although not before Mary had made a great show of going over and talking to him, abandoning Duncan for several minutes. {She didn’t do it to hurt me, Janice, but to help me. She worked hard to try to repair the rift, thought that a ceasefire for the warring Houses might also mean a ceasefire for House Bonmot and House Duncan, but it was not to be.}

  After intermission, the set design devolved even further, and the plot became ever more ludicrous, featuring a plethora of ghosts, and even an appearance by a wingèd fairy—a device so pathetic I thought violence might break out. The singers desperately tried to cover for these faults with stellar, sometimes over-the-top performances, voices drowning out voices, dissonant not in their individual talents, but as a group.

  By the middle of the fourth section, I seemed to have missed some essential act of communication. I had lost the thread of the narrative, I suppose. Actors dressed in deep red uniforms identical to those favored by the Kalif’s soldiers began to appear on the stage, to much clapping and cheering from all of us. Finally, some real costumes! Some spectacle to satiate our lust for pomp. They poured onto the stage in a tight pool, almost as if a bottle of wine had overturned and leaked across a table. In their midst, we saw the white turban of a Kalif’s commander as he fired his guns across the stage with a great crack and recoil. The audience roared once more, for he presented a fine sight on that stage, singing or not singing, with his dark beard and mustache, his piercing gaze.

  He aimed at a singer and s/he fell—Sophia again, poor Sophia, so fated to fall. The leak of blood, miniature mimic of the soldiers’ progress, that spread across the front of Sophia’s white dress, had the effect of renewing our love for the opera. Such melodrama! Such an authentic battle scene!

  From the rising screams and shouts onstage, we naturally expected one clear soprano or alto would rise above, drawing together the threads of chaos. The Kalif’s men would drop their guns and swords. They would become part of a great chorus of voices, or a powerful counterpoint. The lovers would reunite. The houses would reconcile. The curtain would fall, then rise again, that our applause might become more specific, rewarding our favorites.

  But none of these things happened. Not a one of them.

  Instead, the music began to lose its harmony, become discordant, and momentarily returned as strong as ever as a section of foolish woodwinds held their ground. It then dissolved into individual horns and violins before falling away into silence, leaving only the sounds of struggle.

  Silence from the audience, for a moment. {Some of us were just glad the musicians had stopped playing.} Finally, we began to understand. We did not know it to be true all at once, and each of us reached our conclusions separately. But understanding did come to us, some with gasps, some with shouts or screams, others in a silence born of dread or amazement. Under the green light, anything was possible, even an invasion.

  When the white-turbaned commander drew his sword and cut Sophia’s head from his neck and held it, dripping and white, by one gloved hand, we knew any performance had ended minutes before. As we had sat there, watching the opera, the Kalif’s troops had invaded Ambergris. {For me, it was a few seconds later, when Sarah Gallendrace appeared on stage, her belly cut wide open, her impossibly pale hands trying to staunch the flow. That’s when I unfroze.}

  The flag of the Kalif was unfurled on the stage. The moat created by the orchestra pit became so cluttered with the most unmusical of things—dead, hacked-apart people and the remnants of the set, cleared with methodical precision—that it was no great leap for some of the soldiers to bridge it and start firing into the audience.

  Now, in the most orchestrated event of the entire evening, House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe & Lewden gave their reply. It was animal, guttural, and in almost perfect unison. With a great shout of both outrage and fear, out came guns previously hidden. Out came the knives, the swords. While the neutrals—I saw Martin and Merrimount running for an exit—tried to extricate themselves from their now utterly indefensible position, Hoegbotton and Lewden, Hoegbotton and Frankwrithe, came together in a unity of purpose. You could see it in their eyes, that, for a time, all differences would be laid aside to defeat
a common enemy. They poured up toward the stage, firing, stabbing, while the Kalif’s soldiers, under the calm command of their leader, laid down a murderous fire. Bodies fell in the aisles, cut to pieces. The smell of blood and gunpowder rose from the stage. Billowing smoke, caught and distorted in the green light. The utter panic and dissolution of those who had never thought their night might end like this, some in their distress running back and forth as if caged, unable to find their way out.

  Those of us on the balcony seemed to have a better chance than most, unless the front entrance lay blocked. We began to make our way to the stairs and down. We were much calmer than those on the ground floor. Just as the stage had, during the performance, been remote from our rarefied location, so too the violence. We had the sense of it spreading slowly, the stain of the Kalif’s soldiers like some natural force, one that had its own rhythm of invasion, one that would allow us to casually take our leave.

  Lacond had pulled his pistols from their ankle holsters. Sybel wielded a particularly deadly-looking knife so long I wondered how he’d managed to conceal it. My brother had, in his protectiveness for Mary, let his fungal disease overtake him further, so that one eye lay clear and blue while the other had become overgrown with a green curling substance that magnified its intent and size. His right arm he had allowed to become a kind of fungus club, black and shiny. The look on his face told me he was ready to die for Mary, right there, right then. {And perhaps endure a minor maiming for you and Sybel.}

  We took cover behind the battering ram of Lacond, who cleared a path for us by shoving people out of the way. My last glimpse of the stage showed that the Kalif’s soldiers had advanced farther into the audience, the Ambergrisian resistance becoming more of a rearguard attempt to let the majority escape, rather than anything resembling an offensive.