Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The core of these bombs does not explode, but serves as the delivery system for the bomb—ballast, of a sort. The ballast is high in protein and appears to have no harmful side effects, as of yet.

  Some kinds of fungal bullets appear to share these properties.

  “They have a short half-life,” according to Sarah Mindle, one of many Hoegbotton employees recruited to fight in the increasingly confused civil war. “After about five hours, most of them become inert, harmless.”

  High in nutritional content, these bullets are also being harvested by the poor and those cut off from food by the barricades and militias of the various warring factions. Of course, finding the bullets can be hazardous. Knowing when they have become harmless requires yet another set of skills.

  “I wait until [the bullets] lose their purple tinge,” Charles Jarkens said. Jarkens is a homeless man whose wife died in a bombardment at the beginning of the war. “I wait for that, and I wait until they get a little orange around the base of the bullet. That’s when I know they’re good to eat.”

  In an unverified and extreme case, a family whose son was killed by a barrage of such bullets resorted to removing them from the body and eating them.

  What no one can as yet explain is exactly how House Lewden procured such weapons, nor why Hoegbotton & Sons have not yet deployed captured weapons against F&L. Some speculate that the blockade of Ambergris by F&L ships has led to such a reduction in food stores for Hoegbotton’s various militias that the Lewden weapons are, in fact, being deliberately detonated for use as food.

  As might be expected, such incendiary stories led to Lacond’s offices being bombed so many times that he eventually moved his printing presses, under cover of night, to a secret location in the forests outside of Ambergris.

  “Let them stop me now!” he would say, face flushed with defiance. “Those pompous, homicidal swine can blow me up as much as they like—the presses will keep churning out the pages!” {The war, I must say, revitalized Lacond for a time.}

  While the fuel lasted, motored vehicles brought the broadsheet in every morning, and fast runners—usually boys and girls from ten to fifteen years of age, the only group with the stamina for the job who had not already been conscripted by the Hoegbotton militias—would distribute it to a few safe or neutral locations, where it instantly sold out. Distribution was dangerous, and sometimes our runners did not come back. Sybel kept at it for a time, but it wore on his nerves.

  “I can’t take it,” he said one morning. Dark circles had formed around his eyes and he had developed a habit of blinking rapidly, his left hand subject to uncontrollable quivering no matter what his mood. “I can’t take it. I can’t take it.” {What he couldn’t take was working so many jobs at once. Although he did have several disturbing episodes involving either militia members who robbed him at gunpoint, or bombs.}

  Lacond had come to love our work by this time, so he let us use Sybel for our personal missions, which didn’t mean he was in any less danger—just a different kind.

  “You must be doing a good job,” Lacond said once, while all three of us sat on the floor of his office, sweaty and exhausted. “Both sides want your heads on a platter.”

  Thus, it became wiser for us to publish our reports under pseudonyms like Michael Smith and Sarah Pickle. I even began to sleep in different locations, seldom returning to my apartment for fear of a fungal bullet to the back of the head.

  And yet, on certain days, in certain parts of the city, you could walk down a dozen streets and not even realize a war was going on—if you could rationalize the mortar fire as thunder. Markets were open, people walked to work, the telephones operated {even if few wanted to use them}, restaurants served what food they had. The Religious Quarter, for political reasons, remained largely safe, with both H&S and F&L doing a respectable trade in foodstuffs and clothing—sometimes while fighting raged only a few blocks away. {War was also an opportunity for the native tribes, the Dogghe in particular, to make a killing supplying food and collaborating with the enemy—either enemy.} A few times, I was even able to meet with artists and gallery owners, regaining a little respect from them because of my new profession.

  This sometimes sense of safety was in part caused by a retrenchment by both sides following the first seven or eight months of the war. House Lewden’s original probes centered on feints to the southeast and southwest, with the aim of control of H&S headquarters and the docks. But after several intense battles, F&L had been restricted to the northern third of Ambergris. They controlled part of the docks and a portion of Albumuth Boulevard, but they could not smash through to H&S headquarters. Recovering from the initial shock, H&S had found the morale and discipline to hold their ground. Thus, the “front” became relatively stable, except for some porousness due to spies, sneak attacks and, eventually, the Kalif’s mortar fire. The regularity of it became a kind of comfort. {I was never comforted. The whole conflict had troubled me from the beginning. Just trying to guess the reasons for gray cap involvement bothered me. Never before had they backed one faction over another, or even seemed to recognize the difference between factions—or, if they did understand the difference, to care. Why now should they change tactics? Also, their weapons were everywhere, but they were nowhere to be seen.}

  Still, it could not go on forever. The city was in real danger of becoming less than a city, of becoming rubble and black smoke and piles of bodies—of becoming twenty different cities that only loosely formed a country called “Ambergris.”

  Duncan sensed this, but could not really articulate it. {I anticipated it as a feeling deep in my ever-changing body, but could do nothing about it.}

  “We’re near the end,” he said one evening eighteen months into the war, as we sat in the smoldering remains of the Café of the Ruby-Throated Calf. It was more or less neutral ground now that most of it had been destroyed by mortars. At least we could count on no one trying to kill us as we sat there, protected by overturned tables and a few strategically placed shrubs. The service was terrible, but, then, all the waiters were dead.

  Duncan was pale but whole, face dark with dirt, a flurry of cuts rubbed red. We were drinking a couple of bottles of Smashing Todd’s Wartime Stout, which we had found—miraculously whole under a fallen, splintered door—in an abandoned store.

  “Near the end?” I prompted.

  “Yes,” he said, and took a long pull on his beer. “We’re near the end. Something has to give. Someone has to blink. To change. It can’t go on this way. It can’t.”

  “It’s done a fine job of going on this way for a while now, Duncan,” I reminded him. I took a sip of ale. It was warm, almost hot, but the bite of it still tasted good.

  “Maybe I mean I can’t go on this way,” he said.

  “You mean, being paid in eggs, cauliflower, and milk?” I said.

  He laughed, but I knew he was thinking about Mary, always Mary.

  How to express the overlap between war and blissful domesticity? For this was the time of Duncan’s purest happiness—when, for those few months before they began to tear each other apart, he had Mary’s body, her mind, and the little apartment they shared. Mary had come free of her Academy obligations a couple of months before and graduated with honors. Bonmot had no hold over her anymore, except for the hold created by her gratitude. She and Duncan moved into an apartment off of Albumuth Boulevard. A nice little arrangement. In his journal he wrote of a contentment that served as a welcome respite from his aboveground and underground adventures, almost as if Manzikert had confessed to enjoying sewing.

  I wake early to make a pot of tea and to cook up some eggs. We have matching placemats but the plates are all mixed up. A few I bought have some kind of whale motif, while others Mary stole from her father’s house, and these have a tracery of ivy on them. I like mine better. But the forks are all the same.

  It was almost as if he had lost his mind. Didn’t he know the Family Shriek is condemned to wander above and belowground like the most t
ransient of Skamoo nomads? Or like the foraging armies of the doomed infidel Stretcher Jones? {No, I most certainly did not know this, Janice. Until Dad died, we were most assuredly stay-put people. Nothing fated us for a lack of domestic bliss. Besides, without that fragile calm, I don’t think we could have survived the war. It’s odd what stays with you. I still remember the tracery of ivy on those plates she stole, and the pleasure she got from the theft, and the tiny and not-so-tiny cracks that those plates acquired over time from the constant echo of bombardment.}

  What for me had always been like quicksilver, the intense heat of a caress that faded from my memory over time, was for him long, and drawn-out, never far from his thoughts. Another typical entry, from several weeks later, read:

  In the morning: sunshine and her. I’m not sure which I’m more enamored of. This freedom after so much heartache seems almost unreal. She’s here, in front of me, sleeping. I can watch her as long as I like—catalogue the elements of her beauty, from her rose-colored mouth to the fine down above her upper lip to the soft line of her nose to the long lashes that frame her closed eyes to the neck with its delicate glide to the lightly freckled arm that slid out from beneath the sheets during the night. I should wake her. I should. But I can’t. She’s so peaceful right now, and the world outside is not. I gain strength from watching her like this, and I hope I give it back to her as well when she is awake. I must cut this short—the mortars are going off again, and she is beginning to stir.

  {That’s a nice entry, if atypical for more than a short while. I almost feel as if I was trying to convince myself with that entry, considering the horrors of the world around us. I went home to her every night after hours of hard, dangerous work. Under even the best of circumstances, I would hardly have made what you would call a stable lover. But with bombs exploding everywhere, screaming shells digging into the street only blocks away, and the random violence of the militias, I was very unstable. There were times when the danger brought us close together, when we didn’t need words or other constraints, like it had been back at Blythe. And then it was good. But the rest of the time, I struggled to love her despite the tense, closet-like atmosphere. I admit it—there was no way to preserve the allure of the forbidden, of having to sneak into her room at night. Now I was the man who snored at night and sometimes, choking on the spores in my throat, woke gagging. I think I began to scare her almost from the beginning. This was everything she hadn’t seen yet. She wasn’t ready for me. She was brave in many ways, but not in that way. And I can’t blame her.}

  We sat there in the café and watched as, across the street, six Hoegbotton irregulars took up positions behind a stand of trees and began firing into the buildings, from which came spiraling the distinctive crimson bullets that had become known as “Lewden Specials.” Two of Hoegbotton’s men went down writhing and clutching their chests. An F&L supporter fell from the third story of one of the buildings and landed with a wet thud on the pavement below in a confusing welter of blood and bone.

  And we just sat there, watching and drinking our ale. Really, it was tame next to what we had already seen. Really, it was expected. So we sat there for another half hour and talked while men killed each other across the street.

  Then, of course, the Kalif invaded during the night of the opera performance, and we suddenly had a new topic to write about.

  KALIF’S MEN SURROUND CITY:

  OCCUPATION, PHASE II? ONE MAN’S OPINION

  D.J. Shriek

  The Kalif has in the past given us telephones, guns, and a variety of delicious cheeses. Now, it appears that the current Kalif wishes to give us two things we already have in abundance: bombs and war.

  Clearly, the Kalif has forgotten the essential lessons of history. During the first Occupation, before the Silence, the citizens of Ambergris set aside their petty squabbles long enough to thoroughly demoralize and defeat the Western Menace.

  Now the Kalif has returned, bombarding the city with mortar fire from the outskirts. Despite a brief foray into Ambergris, apparently for the sole purpose of ruining our enjoyment of a humble but entertaining opera, the Kalif seems generally reluctant to send his troops into our streets. Apparently, he believes he will not need to enter Ambergris, that we will simply capitulate like some Stockton ne’er-do-well.

  He may be wrong in this assumption, however. Instead, his actions appear to have united enemies whose only previous commonality was an ampersand.

  Along Albumuth Boulevard yesterday, this reporter saw elements of House Lewden’s Twelfth Militia and House Hoegbotton’s Fifth Irregular Infantry {or the “Filthies,” as they’re commonly known} moving in concert toward the docks, intent on rooting out any of the Kalif’s men unlucky enough to still be in the area.

  Besides this circumstantial evidence, respected sources tell this reporter that Hoegbotton & Sons and Frankwrithe & Lewden may orchestrate a general ceasefire, the main goal of which will be to ensure the Kalif’s defeat prior to the resumption of hostilities.

  The broadsheets accompanying the Kalif’s mortar fire haven’t helped the Kalif win much support, either. These odd, half-shredded love letters to our great city indicate that the Kalif has come to “liberate the citizens of Ambergris from chaos and tyranny.”

  “Frankly,” says the typical man on the street {at least typical among those who are still alive and not crawling with fungal bullets}, “I thought we were already doing a good enough job of that ourselves. This is our squabble. Between us and those bastards from F&L. The Kalif should stay out of it.”

  The broadsheets also indicate that “To preserve the rare antiquities and collective wisdom of the Religious Quarter, the Kalif has decided to stepped in and bring an end to the conflict.”

  “Stepped in,” indeed.

  Many of us wondered why Stockton, Nicea, and other Southern cities had not intervened in the conflict—after all, their trade was profoundly affected by this split between merchant houses. Now we knew—they had been calling on a higher power, and although it had taken almost two years for that august entity, the Kalif, to take notice, take notice he had. He would have needed little real pretext; after all, in each Kalif’s heart must burn the desire for revenge upon our city for earlier defeats.

  The scream of the Kalif’s mortar fire—often indiscriminate or ill-timed—was a welcome contrast to the whine of fungal bullets, the garrulous chatter of Hoegbotton guns. {As the city was at war, so, by then, was my body. The rumblings of my belly, where fungus fought fungus—much remarked upon by Mary in her less charitable moments—matched the Kalif’s invasion. The sharp pains that sometimes annihilated my chest hurt no more or less than the spiraling flight of bullets through the Ambergrisian air.}

  Perhaps more insanely, no one paid the Kalif’s troops much attention once we knew H&S and F&L had united against them. Even the day they came marching down Albumuth Boulevard on a daylight raid in a long, proud column of red, we ignored them. We had suffered through too much war. Either we could not digest this new threat, or we felt no need to.

  This, then, is how things stood that year on the threshold of the Festival.

  2

  There came a night so terrible that no one ever dared to name it. There came a night so terrible that I could not. There came a night so terrible that no one could explain it. There came the most terrible of nights. No, that’s not right, either. There came the most terrible of nights that could not be forgotten, or forgiven, or even named. That’s closer, but sometimes I choose not to revise. Let it be raw and awkward splayed across the page, as it was in life.

  Words would later be offered up like “atrocity,” “massacre,” and “madness,” but I reject those words. They did not, could not, cannot, contain what they need to contain.

  Could we have known? Could we have wrenched our attention from our more immediate concerns long enough to understand the warning signs? Now, of course, it all seems clear enough. Duncan had said the war could not continue in the same way for long, and he was right
.

  As soon as Duncan and I saw Voss Bender’s blind, blindingly white head floating down the River Moth two days before the Festival, we should have had a clue.

  “There’s a sight you don’t see very often,” Duncan said, as we sat on an abandoned pier and watched the head and the barge that carried it slowly pull away into the middle of the river. A kind of lukewarm sun shone that day, diluted by swirls of fog.

  “It’s a sight I’ve never seen before, Duncan,” I replied.

  F&L had cut apart a huge marble statue of Voss Bender that had stood in the Religious Quarter for almost twenty years and loaded it, piece by piece, onto the barge, displaying a remarkably dexterous use of pulleys and levers. There lay the pieces of Bender, strewn to all sides of his enormous, imperious, crushingly heavy head. About to disappear up the River Moth. As vulnerable-looking in that weak sunlight as anything I had ever seen.

  “I wonder what the people who live along the banks of the river will think about it,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Duncan asked.

  “Will they see it as the demolition, the destruction, of a god, or will they be strangely unmoved?”

  Duncan laughed. “I’m strangely unmoved.”

  In part, we had come to the pier to relax. We were both still a little rattled from a close call the day before, when we had arrived at what was supposedly the scene of a bomb attack only to find the bombs exploding as we got there. My hair was dirty and streaked with black from the explosion. My face had suffered half a dozen abrasions. Duncan had had a thumbnail-sized chunk of his ear blown off. Already, it had begun to regenerate, which I found fascinating and creepy at the same time. {Do you want a glimpse of something even more fascinating? The real problem was: it wasn’t my ear. That had been blown off a long time before.}