Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I ignored her. The fungi were like pale hands beneath our tread. I had to carry her for a while. “We’re almost there,” I said.

  “Almost where?” she asked, trembling in my arms. “Almost dead?”

  What can I tell you about our escape to the Truffidian Cathedral? What, I wonder, will put it all in the proper perspective? I hardly know where to begin, but, then, that’s not unusual. There’s no balance between measured prose and raw experience that does not end in mediocrity or a slow burn into oblivion.

  It happened like this: Sybel and I left the shelter of the roof and began to make our way through back streets and alleys to the Truffidian Cathedral. It was the only landmark I could think of that might be safe.

  “What if the cathedral’s been overrun?” Sybel asked.

  “Then we go somewhere else,” I said. “But we have to try.”

  Sybel knew as well as I did that we couldn’t sit still—we couldn’t stay on that roof and wonder what might be coming over the ledge next.

  The world we found ourselves in was silent. In some places the lamps were on, and in others they were not. Where they were on, they illuminated everything in purples or greens. The purple and the green both came from spores. The spores were heavy in the air; so as not to breathe them, we tore strips from our clothing and put them over our mouths and noses.

  Was it effective? I’m still alive today, but at the time I could not get over the uncomfortable feeling that I was breathing in thousands of tiny lives, that I was one step away from becoming Duncan.

  I said that the world was silent. Do you understand what I mean by that? I mean that there was no sound anywhere in the city. The spores clotted the air, muffled noises, sucked the sound out of the world. We lived in silence. It was like a Presence, and it was watchful. As we sidled along a wall, keeping to the shadows for long moments, I felt that each spore was a tiny eye, and that each eye was reporting back to an unseen master. A heaviness grew in my lungs that I’ve never felt since. The air was trying to suck words as yet unspoken out of me, and snuff them, stillborn.

  Silence and haze. The purple and green of the spores made the air heavy, made it hard to see more than two feet in front of us. It was a kind of fog, through which we could just make out the distant flames that signified the destruction of the Kalif’s army.

  But I don’t mean to suggest that this silent haze was empty. It wasn’t. As we picked our way through streets turned foreign, unrecognizable, hints of movement suggested themselves, almost out of view, always on the periphery. We did not turn to look at whatever walked there, for fear this would make it too real. That which watched there ignored us, went on past—saving energy for other, more important missions, no doubt. But this made it no less frightening.

  Nor did it blunt the effect of the human catastrophe that came out of the haze and lingered for far too long in our vision. Some lampposts played host to bodies swinging from ropes, heads lolling, tongues distended, skin pulled back in caricatures of smiles. Other bodies crowded the street, stumbled over in the dark. Pieces of people that appeared to be carefully cut apart, not the victims of mortar fire, but in precise stacks: legs, arms, torsos. The moon overhead like the knuckle of a fist pressed against a dirty window.

  And always the motion, so unnerving that at one point I fired into the dark, screamed into the shadows, “Come out! Come out, you bastards!”

  Sybel didn’t even try to stop me. He just stared ahead and kept walking. His gaze was haunted, his face vacant. Not all fears are the same. I met mine on the roof; Sybel met his on the streets.

  We reached the outskirts of the Religious Quarter by taking two steps forward, a step sideways, a step back, two forward, always almost seeing the vague delineation of ghosts, flitting and circling.

  The Religious Quarter rose out of the mire of night as an outline of domes and steeples, highlighted by the flames that lay miles behind them. In that light, it looked unearthly, bizarre, not of Ambergris. Still, we entered it, in the hopes that that way lay safety. We allowed ourselves to come under the influence of those spires, those outcroppings of alcoves, all silent, all dead, not a priest in sight. {Probably cowering in their basements for all the good it would do them.}

  We were on a street called Bannerville. I remember that. The streetlamps there were bare of the terrible burden of death. Some of them worked. Glowed green. At the end of Bannerville, we’d turn to the right and we’d be a block away from the Truffidian Cathedral.

  A strange surge of joy or recognition overtook us, all out of proportion to our reality. We began to run, to laugh, abandoning our shuffle through the shadows; with safety so close, it was agony to walk. The worst seemed past. It really did. I was already thinking about what I’d say to Bonmot. I was already thinking about that, Truff help me.

  Sybel had stopped holding my hand. He was a little behind me at this point. We were almost at the end of Bannerville, not more than twenty feet from safety. Overhead, a street lamp flickered free of the green glow that pervaded the rest of the city.

  We were both about to turn the corner. I could hear Sybel’s heavy breathing as he ran. Then I heard an unfamiliar sound—a sound trapped between a gasp and a moan—and when I turned to look back at Sybel, all I could see was a mist of blood, floating out in streamers. I stopped running and stared. I couldn’t breathe for a second. Nothing of him was left—not even his shoes. Nothing at all. His dissolution was complete. Utter. There was such a final and terrible beauty to it that I thought it must be an absurd magic trick, a horrible joke. But it wasn’t, and the laughter caught in my throat, became a sob. Sybel had died, almost in front of my eyes, less than a block from the cathedral. A moment later, I realized it must have been one of F&L’s fungal mines, but for an instant it seemed more deadly, more immediate—something personal.

  When I tried to move—away from the blood mist? toward it?—I put pressure down on my right foot, felt a shock of pain, and fell to the ground. That’s when I realized that the mine had also erased my right foot, shoe and all. There was now just a stump. Nothing else. I lay on the ground, panting, and watched the blood dribble out of the part of the wound that hadn’t been cauterized. The silence had been transformed into a pounding of blood in my ears, a slow, aching pulse. It reminded me of the blood I’d let spurt from my wrists, and for a moment I was content to watch it leak out of me—all of this liquid that constituted me at a level more basic than brain or mind, soul or spirit. I almost let it happen. I almost decided to lie back and let it happen.

  But then I thought of poor Sybel and something changed inside of me. We had come so far. We had almost made it. I started to shout or scream then, but not words, nothing as coherent as words.

  I took the strip of cloth from around my mouth and made a crude tourniquet to stop the bleeding. Around me, the blood mist that had been Sybel writhed in strands of gorgeous crimson, already dissipating.

  I got up, grit in my teeth. I began to hop around the corner, toward safety. I don’t know how long it took, or even what was happening around me—all I could focus on was the sound of my remaining shoe against gravel as I hopped, pain in my left leg from balancing the weight of my entire body. At some point I fell and could not get back up. I remember crawling until I reached the great doors of the Truffidian Cathedral, rising long enough to shove those doors open, pushing my way inside, and then falling to the floor.

  Everyone inside the Cathedral was dead. I lay where I had fallen, next to a corpse. We stared at each other, eye to eye, and it took me a while to realize that somewhere in the background, near the altar, something was moving.

  Once we reached our destination, I set Mary down. We stood in a large, circular cavern. Green lichens coated the floor. The walls reflected red-and-green, spores floating through the gold-gray light. I had made a throne of mushrooms for her, lavender and silver. I had sent into the air perpetually twirling strands of emerald fungi, like shiny crepe paper. I had carved a table to appear from the ground, and upon it se
t a cup of pure cold water from an aquifer. And beside it, three mushrooms—orange, blue, and purple—that would not only feed her but leave her feeling strong and calm.

  I had spent a long time preparing for that moment. And yet, I must admit, not everything in that cavern lay under my control. How could it? Something was laughing in a corner, at a pitch no ordinary human ear could hear. Something nonhuman. It almost sounded like human speech. Things crept and crawled through the murk. A smell like rotted mango permeated the cavern. But, still, this was as safe a place as you could find belowground. It was my laboratory, my refuge. I knew everything here, including the thing that laughed. I knew them all on the most basic of levels. I relaxed as Mary wrapped her arms around me. I thought she would appreciate all that I had given her. But she wouldn’t talk to me, and she refused to look around. I couldn’t talk to her, either. Instead, I turned away so she wouldn’t see the veins of emerald creeping up my face.

  They stayed for hours in that secluded cavern, sitting or standing. They spoke, if at all, in whispers, and sometimes not even whispers because some new threat would approach every few minutes, requiring utter silence.

  “I was happy,” Duncan wrote in his journal. “I thought we were reaching a new closeness, one beyond words. That the extremity of our situation would make us as one. Instead, we were growing further apart with each passing minute. Now, I am confused by my happiness that night. Was I blind?” {Was there a moment when I switched from the epiphany of discovery to the weight of discovery? I don’t know, except that one day I realized that knowledge—especially secret knowledge—had become a burden.}

  Mary’s assault began from that moment, from the moment when her mind refused to accept what she had seen, for she maintained her distance all the way back up to the surface the next morning.

  From that moment, it was only a matter of time until the flesh necklace, until I would confront her at the base of the stairs. It smoldered in her eyes, as indelible as the mottling of fungus on Duncan’s body. All of her scholarship, all of her will, would be focused on making what she had seen as unreal, as distant, as possible. Who could blame her? I could, and did, even if Duncan lacked the nerve. It was a failure—a failure of love and of imagination.

  While they waited underground, I lay on the cathedral floor, gray caps walking among the bodies, me dead and yet not dead, seeing yet sightless, staring up at a ceiling that depicted the glory of the Truffidian cosmos. It almost might have been a premonition of Sabon’s flesh necklace. It too was incongruous to its surroundings. It too was dead and yet not dead, blind yet had eyes. But mostly I had not a thought in my head as I tried to survive by playing dead next to such a weight of bodies. I had no room for grief at that moment. I had no time for tears. In that moment, I began to relax. I began to give up my self. I had no choice. I had nowhere to hide, nothing to hide with.

  That is the night I stopped being a reporter and became something else entirely.

  3

  The closer I get to the end, the closer I get to the beginning. Memories waft up out of the ether, out of nothing. They attach themselves to me like the green light, like the fungi that continue to colonize my typewriter. I had to stop for a while—my fingers ached and, even after all that I have seen, the fungi unnerved me. I spent the time flexing and unflexing my fingers, pacing back and forth. I also spent it going through a box of my father’s old papers—nothing I haven’t read through a hundred times before. Drafts of history essays, letters to colleagues, perhaps even the letter he received from the Kalif’s Court, if I dig deep enough. On top, Duncan had placed the dried-up starfish, its skeleton brittle with age. {I kept it there as a reminder to myself. After your letter to me—which, while reading this account, I sometimes think was written by an entirely different side of your personality—I wanted to remember that no matter how isolated I might feel, separated from others by secret knowledge, I was still connected. It didn’t help much, though—it reminded me how different I had become.}

  I’ve put the starfish on my table here, as something akin to a good luck charm. Perhaps it will help me finish.

  Next to the starfish, I found sea shells, dull and chipped—the last remnants of our most noteworthy vacation. I was ten, Duncan six. Our dad had gone on sabbatical from his position as a history professor at the Porfal College of History and Advanced Theory {or as Dad called it, “Poor Paul’s Collage of Hysterics and Advanced Decay”} in Stockton. I cannot recall ever taking a weeklong vacation before or since. Dad had bought berths on a river barge for us. Mom was relaxed, happy. Dad was as calm and at peace as I’ve ever seen him.

  I remember one habit he picked up during that vacation. He liked to take a stalk of sedge weed and hold it in his mouth like a pipe, gnawing on the end, a wide-brimmed hat shading his face. We’d sit in the deck chairs and read, or watch the countryside go by.

  In those days, the west side of the River Moth was almost entirely uninhabited. We saw strange animals come to the water’s edge to drink; they would look at us with curiosity, but no fear. Once, we saw odd, short people dressed in outlandish clothes, staring across the water at us with a peculiar intensity. The water formed a mirror in which our images reached out to theirs across the waves—stretched, unreal.

  We took the barge down to the Southern Isles, where we spent four days on the beaches. We couldn’t afford to go farther than the northernmost island of Hathern, with its black sand and the melancholy ruins of the long-dead Saphant Empire, but we still had a good time.

  Mom refused to go in the water, so she had to put up with Dad splashing water at her. Dad loved to swim—although “bob” or “float” might more accurately describe what he looked like when he took to the waves. Mom loved to watch the sunrises and sunsets from our little rented bungalow. During the day, she would walk along the beach for hours, and always brought back shells and shiny rocks for us. Sometimes Duncan and I went with her, sometimes we stayed with Dad.

  At dusk, we sat on a blanket together and Dad would make a fire, cooking fish over the flames. I can’t remember if he bought the fish or caught them. I don’t remember him being much of a fisherman.

  Then Dad would lecture us in a teasing way about the mighty Saphant Empire.

  Pointing to the black-gray nubs and jagged walls drowning in the sand and sea, suffused with the orange of sunset, he would say, “Those are the result of war. A naval conflict and then the survivors fought on this very beach. There used to be a city here. Now, just what you see. And then…and then!” And then he would find a way to bring pirates and adventures into his history lesson.

  I didn’t give his words about war much thought at the time. The ruins were just great rocks to climb on, tidal pools to explore. That men had fought and died there hundreds of years ago seemed too remote from our vacation to be real.

  Another time, Dad presented me with a tiny hermit crab in a white coiled shell.

  “Don’t hurt it,” he said, “and leave it on the beach when we go.”

  “I will,” I said, marveling at the feel of its tiny legs against the skin of my palm.

  The sand crunching between my toes; the heat and breeze off the sea, the lights of boats far offshore.

  Mom looked after Duncan for most of the trip, because he was young and needed constant attention. {I remember only the vaguest flash of sunlight, the most tenuous thread of a memory of water—it was all too idyllic for me to retain, I suppose.}

  It is one of the only times I can recall the full attention of my father upon me. Five years later, he would die. Eight years later, my mother would bring us to Ambergris and the house by the River Moth. Twenty years later, Duncan would feel the first twinge of the fungal colonization occurring within him. Twenty-five years after our long-ago vacation, I would try to kill myself. Thirty years later and the War of the Houses would almost kill us all.

  How can such a pleasurable memory as a childhood vacation coexist comfortably with memories of the war? How can the world contain such extremes? I th
ought about such things as I lay among the bodies in the Truffidian Cathedral. Each question begat another question, so that soon the questions seemed to contain their own answers.

  I lay there for a very long time, gazing at nothing and no one while the gray caps rummaged all around me, each syllable of their clicking speech a knife slid between my shoulder blades. I do not know what they were looking for, nor whether they found it. I could hear them rolling bodies over, rifling through the pockets of the dead. Once, a clawing hand brushed against the side of my face. I could feel someone or something looking at me; I refused to look back. I could feel the breath of one of them upon me, smell the spurling tangle of scents that clung to them like their skin: must and mold and funk and dust and a trace of some spice.

  And then, finally, the stained glass above me refracted the light of the sun, and it was dawn, and the gray caps were gone, and I was still alive, surrounded by hundreds of the dead, the blood upon them dark and caked.

  Stiffly, like an old woman, I propped myself up, struggled to raise myself onto my foot, stared around me at the carnage.

  The dead did not look peaceful. The dead did not look planned or purposeful, or at rest, or any other combination of words that might signify comfort or the rule of law. Legs and arms lay at unnatural angles, torn or contorted or dislocated from torsos. Mouths were caught in extremes of pain and fear and surprise. Dried blood and gathering flies. Skin a pale yellow tinged with blue. Great wounds, like vast claws, had cut into chests leaving dull red furrows. A row of heads disembodied. After a while, I had to stop looking. I had to stop myself from looking.

  I wish I could have told you they looked beautiful.

  That is when I resolved I would never become one of them. I had to find a way out. {Even if it meant typing up an afterword in bad light, on a limited budget, for a potential readership of thousands or none?}